Cheese caused a trip I could have done without

I just went to the urgent care centre because cheese.

A couple of days ago I bought two nice mini-wheels of baby Brie, and today decided I’d have some for a mid-afternoon snack.  One of them went down pretty well with some Triscuit, and I finished the eight-ounce wheel over about an hour.

Half an hour after that, hives sprouted all down the back of both thighs, across my lower back and sides, itchy patches on my thumb webs and finger joint skin, and wheezes—all the classic symptoms of food allergic reaction except for palatal itching and throat swelling.  I looked in the mirror and my face was a cherry-like shade that didn’t bode well either.  We recently finished off a box of Triscuit by itself without any trouble, so the Brie pretty much had to have caused all this whoop-te-do.

I sighed, as well as I could for the wheezing, got dressed, and drove to the nearest urgent care centre.  The doctor looked me over, noted my pulse was racing (well yes; I’d just taken a shot of my albuterol inhaler) but other vitals were normal, and agreed this sounded like a classic food allergy episode.  She reluctantly (her word) prescribed a cortisone injection over giving me a five-day prednisone dospak, which would have monkeyed with my diabetes worse than the injection would. I told her that sometimes she didn’t get to have good choices in medicine, only less-bad ones and let’s go on with the injection.

She made me sit around for ten minutes after the shot to see whether the cortisone was going to blow up my heart rate. When it didn’t, she gave me several pages of advice about allergies (things I already knew) and sent me home with a recommendation to take Claritin and Zantac for their antihistaminic properties, Benadryl at bedtime if I had any, and make sure I started carrying my Epi-pen at all times.

I intend to follow the Claritin and Zantac advice, but am not going to start shlepping an Epi-pen.  I have to carry too many other things with me already, and I think (we’ll start conducting some controlled experiments) that I’m going to find the problem is green cheeses and aged ones will still be OK. In which case I’ll do what I do about my shellfish allergy: make a mild commotion with waiters to impress the idea on them that having a patron carried out dead is bad publicity, so make sure there isn’t any [x] in what I order.

Now, three hours later, the great majority of the itching has gone away and left only the hive-y bumps, and those will cool off in a day or so.  But really—all of this because cheese???