When I was 22, Mom took me to an allergist. I had just gotten engaged to Gary, and I guess she wanted to hand me over to him with all my medical difficulties documented and disclosed, as if she was selling a house. "Don't give her raw egg whites, or the sewer will back up."
The allergist greeted us, and Mom listed the things she suspected I was allergic to (penicillin, sulfa, raw egg whites) and said she wanted him to give me one of those scratch tests to see what else I needed to avoid.
"No point," he said. "I could test her today, and then tomorrow she could be allergic to an entirely different list of substances."
Mom was baffled in the face of an allergist who didn't seem to believe in her interpretation of allergies. She said, "So, she just had sulfa and her face swelled up. You are telling me that tomorrow she might not, so you won't test her?"
He didn't answer. Instead he asked, "Why did she get sulfa?"
"Because she had a bladder infection."
And then the doctor asked my mother to let him speak with me privately, and then he asked me if I was having sex and explained to me that was how I got the bladder infection. I just nodded, as if I hadn't already looked bladder infection up in our family medical encyclopedia.
I met up with Mom by the elevator, where she was fuming. She grumbled, "What was the big secret?"
"He wanted to tell me sex can cause bladder infections."
"Ridiculous waste of time," she said.
Now, forty-one years later, I am spending the morning in an allergist's office, essentially asking the same question Mom did all those years ago. It’s totally possible the doctor will just tell me that I could be allergic to penicillin one day and not the next. I’m looking forward to hearing that.
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