the stack

(Let’s get the subject line out of the way, since there’s a few buts and howevers re: my reported hives.)

“This form, why do you not mark ‘Asian’?”
“I’m not Asian.”
*intake nurse stares disbelievingly*
“It says to check one box. My mother is Asian; my father, white European. Hence ‘other’.”
I waited while the nurse reread the instructions, glanced at me again, looked back at the sheet. Only then did she let me sit down and offer me the blood-pressure cuff. (My age or a little younger, visually SE Asian.)

“This would be easier if my arm were bigger, I guess.”
“Yes,” matter-of-factly. (Different nurse.)

Okay, the buts. The doctor I saw prefers specific confirm/deny tests over the broad-spectrum option—”If you don’t have trouble with it, there’s no point in being anxious,” with which I agree—so he ordered a test for wheat plus the airborne panel, not a full set of food tests. The airborne panel involves 22 components. Two are there as checks: “saline control,” which ought not to react unless one’s skin is very irritated, and “histamine” as its opposite, in case of no reaction to the rest of the panel. (No one explained this to me, so it’s possible that my nearly twenty-year-old memories of AP Biology are wrong, but I’m pretty sure.) Instead of needles, there were somewhat broader bits that were pressed quickly into the upper layers of my skin to introduce each droplet of liquid: a little pressure, no pain. My skin reacted rather spectacularly at a few of the test spots and reacted somewhat to most of them, including the wheat, but I am deemed not allergic to wheat—it was the smallest of the reactions. I am to feel free to eat it in “your usual small quantities” (aside from trace/cross-contamination, I eat wheat-containing food at perhaps four or five out of the 21 meals in a week). Instead, or in addition, I am to keep an eye on where the hives occurred because they’re “probably evidence of some kind of autoimmune issue.” When the body is irritated, it may continue irritating itself after the initial problem has subsided or been removed; even catching a mild cold can reignite the reaction. And the smallness of my wheat intake is useful here, says the doctor, because I had a non-zero reaction to the wheat quintip, after all; wheat may contribute a bit to general inflammation, and the hives I induced deliberately when believing that wheat was the cause may indeed have been wheat-provoked!

Funny: one may read the doctor’s assessment as meaning that pain can give me hives, which is awesome for someone with low-level chronic pain. Well, we’ll see. He confirmed that fexofenadine (Allegra) is better for my situation than loratadine (Claritin) or cetirizine (Zyrtec), laughed a little that I knew the chemical names, and suggested fexofenadine or diphenhydramine (Benadryl) if I have mild irritation. Then he had to look up all four re: breastfeeding. Fexofenadine isn’t great for breastfeeding—it crosses the barrier—so I’ll continue trying to do without; I haven’t had any in three years, since I began trying to become pregnant, and on most days it’s easy to do without. (And: Zyrtec makes me extremely thirsty without drying up my nose, Claritin has almost no effect, and Benadryl didn’t help with itchiness when I had chicken pox at age twelve. Shrug. Hurray for drugs formulated for other people, by which I mean individuals of genetic inheritances sufficiently different from mine.)

The airborne panel (“environmental/pollens”) that I had consists of mite mix (as in dust mites and their cousins), alternaria (fungus), mountain cedar, cladosporium (a common fungus), bermuda grass (which I already knew I’m allergic to, from backyard grass-mowing as a teen), dog, aspergillus (mold), cat (also knew about), acacia, perennial rye (not the eating kind but the grasslike stuff I mowed alongside bermuda grass), saline control, western ragweed, lamb’s quarter (a weed in NorAm related to quinoa), english plantain (which looks nothing like the kind one fries), sagebrush, oak, olive, walnut, white alder, elm mix, western sycamore, histamine. It’s important—well. It’s important for no one reading this to take it as medical advice, since I am one individual and am not typing out everything the doctor said; I was going to say that it’s important to note that one can manifest an allergic reaction to something via the test but be fine eating it in small quantities. I cook sometimes with olive oil and eat the occasional olive at a party, without apparent trouble, yet the quintip test says I’m allergic to it. [ETA I've been told over at the cross-post that olive as fruit and olive as pollen involved different allergens, and I'm not sure which the quintip had. The "fine in small quantities" thing stands, however, because that's exactly what I've been told for wheat itself.]

And—at two hours after the testing, most of the irritated spots have gone down, though visible redness remains; the three most reactive spots are still bumpy. That’s different from how the hives manifested and ebbed/recurred. Whatever else may pertain, the hives I had are probably not the sole and direct result of something on this panel. I would much rather have had a verdict of wheat allergy, by the way—something concrete—because a diagnosis of random autoimmune thingy is open-ended. Let’s not develop lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, eh?