No Longer Allergic to Fish

Today, Dave and I went out to eat. Dave ordered two fish tacos, ate them, and didn’t die!

Most of you probably don’t understand why this is worthy of such excitement. Well, you see, Dave is deathly allergic to fish.

Dave grew up eating a lot of fish as a child. His dad would fish in the Monterey Bay regularly and smoked salmon was a common meal at the Lofte house. This was, in fact, Dave’s favorite food. One day, when he was about 10 years old, Dave’s throat swelled up when eating fish and was rushed to the hospital. The doctor concluded that he was allergic to fish… a very sad day for Dave.

Over the past 18 years, Dave has had reactions to fresh water fish, shell fish, and saltwater fish. Once, he was in a room with garbages filled with rotting fish and this was enough for his throat to start to swell. Another time, someone lied to him and told him that fish sticks were chicken strips (what an ass).

A couple years ago we were at a restaurant that served a lot of fish and I stressed to the waiter that Dave was allergic to fish. The waiter informed me as if I were an idiot that Dave’s chicken plate would not have any fish. I made it clear that even a little fish juice would be enough to trigger a reaction and the waiter rolled his and told me he’d tell the chef. Sure enough, Dave had a reaction to the chicken. The waiter nervously ran off when I told him and came back shamefully admitting that his chicken was indeed cooked in a sauce with fish juice. I wanted to punch him.

This spring, the dentist that my mom works for tried to convince her that she had too many heavy metals in her system and needed to do some special detox. My mom believed it was a hoax, but played along anyway. She had to make some weird little cilantro mixture every day for like a month to see if there was improvement. You see, my mom and I can’t wear earrings without our ears itching. It doesn’t matter how expensive of a metal the earrings are made of, our ears itch. Even necklaces bother my mom. Well, her dentist assured her that this little detox would change that. So when the month was up, mom put on some earrings… and her ears didn’t instantly itch – improvement indeed!

Next time she was at work, she told her boss she was now a believer and wanted to know more. He told her about this bottle of liquid you could take and it was supposed to be an excellent heavy metal detox. It’s called BioRay NDF Plus. One bottle of this stuff was good for two people… and it cost $250! Well, my mom, being the good mom that she is, bought two bottles – one for her and my dad and another for me and Dave. No, Dave and I did not have a choice in the matter.

Let me tell you… this process sucked. We called it the “drops”. This is how it worked – the first day you took one drop in the morning and another drop at night. (By the way, these are eye dropper drops… tiny.) The second day you took two drops in the morning and two more at night. The third day… you get the idea. This pattern continued until day 26 when you were doing 26 drops twice a day… TWENTY-SIX!! It’s is not fun counting out 26 drops from an eye dropper! Then you had to continue doing these 26 drops until the bottle was gone. The whole process probably took about 2 months.

So what does this have to do with Dave’s fish allergy? About halfway through this obnoxious detox, Dave did some research on it. He found out that one of these heavy metals was mercury… which is in fish. Further research showed that doctors will have people who are allergic to fish go through detoxes like this and it often gets rid of the allergy. Suddenly this whole detox thing this didn’t seem so bad.

A couple weeks ago, Dave bought a package of smoked salmon to test if the detox worked. It took him all day to eat the package because he was nervous, but he ate it all without a reaction!

Now today we went out for fish tacos. He did not eat slow and cautiously this time, instead he devoured them and I had my phone ready to call 911. Thankfully, I didn’t need to use my phone and Dave got to finally enjoy some fish… something he hasn’t been able to do for 18 years!

Oh, and I can wear earrings without my ears itching…