The Weddening Part Two: Food

This is the second and last part of the "I GOT MARRIED" posts, but the food-stuff merited it's own thing... So here ya go. 

Due to concerns about allergies, we were pretty unwavering on wanting to know exactly what ingredients would be used in the foods.  We asked to meet with the chef, which is a generally normal wedding thing anyway… 

We were told “Oh, there’s no reason to be concerned!”
So we reiterated that despite that, we would feel a lot better speaking directly to the chef.

The response was, “Do you want to call other people with different allergies who ate here?”

No, we don’t.  We want to talk to the chef about the ingredients and OUR list of allergens.  Like, great that you didn’t kill a completely different person in a totally different scenario?
This went on for months.

It was a clusterfuck of upsetting.

Finally, we got a, “I gave your list to the chef, and there are some problems.  Can we do a meeting?”

The.  Fuck.  

Did I mention we didn’t like our wedding planner lady? 

Have I mentioned (a thousand times) that I’m recovering from a food phobia and I am pretty damn delicate about not wanting to be poisoned from my many REAL allergies?

Just picking the menu was a bigger hassle than it should have been.  She told us to circle everything we could possibly want on the menu, to then edit down later.  

So we did that.  

She panicked and said, “You chose a lot of stuff guys…”  Right.  Like you said.  We were not intending to actually eat all that.  (Also, take the fucking chocolate fountain off of the list for the tenth time, you lunatic.)

The first chef wasn’t a bad guy, and I’d like to say he made great food, but I’ll never know.  

He insisted he would only make a special plate, instead of altering his recipes for the people paying him to cook.  “So yours will be terrible and tasteless”   

 …Right.  

That tasting was a lot of everyone around me explaining how I can’t eat ANYTHING and must be SO MISERABLE ALL THE TIME.  Mind you, I did this to myself in one regard.  

When I listed off my food allergies, I included things that will straight up kill me if ingested, right along with stuff I’m just intolerant to, like things that make me a little physically uncomfortable, thinking that I’d rather not run to the bathroom at my own wedding.  

I included soy on this list though it probably shouldn't have been there.  I used to have a HUGE PROBLEM with soy way back in the day.  Not a hive-gonna-die reaction, but a running-to-the-bathroom-and-praying reaction.  Now, I can generally eat things that contain soy.  I really can.  REALLY, I can.  

I’m still not going to eat a brick of tofu any time soon, but if something is made with soybean oil, I’m totally fine. 

But, yeah.    

I didn’t correct anyone when this was treated like my actually dangerous allergies, because it was a matter of principle and trust.

If I now let this go, what else would they think was okay?  

See, again, we weren’t originally even going to get a tasting of any kind, because we didn’t count as important. 

  

This woman even said OUT LOUD, “We aren’t making the margins that we typically do.”  Like… did she… Did she think we don’t know what that means? 

  

What?

So that first chef, what we have is a super-hip know-it-all who apparently isn’t actually that talented if he CAN make separate food just for me special, but can’t figure out how to make it delicious, so I’ll get a special plate.  

I didn’t want a special plate.  I wanted to feel normal.  For one damn day of my life.  I wanted hope that I might have that feeling more than once.  

I had been dealing with this food phobia for over three years.  

I just wanted to feel like a normal person during my own goddamn wedding.  I just wanted to feel safe AND be able to eat what everyone else was eating without fear.  We didn’t understand why we couldn’t just have what he put in front of me for everyone else. 

We were eventually asked to do a 2^nd meeting with no further explanation where we were introduced to the NEW chef who had no problem making the entire menu without using anything off the allergen list.

And the desserts!  Trying to find a nut-free cake was a giant pain in the ass.  Every place we found that said “nut free” was also everything-else free, and so would wind up using other things that make me sick, if not could kill me.   

Totally unhelpful.   

A lot of those places also seemed to be doing that out of a fad-thing rather than with allergies actually in mind.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Finally, I found a freaking “Living With Allergies” help board online, which led to finding a woman in the area who works right out of her kitchen.   

She was able to provide us with a nut-free cake (bottom layer was chocolate with strawberry filling, the middle was a yellow cake with Oreo filling, and the top was chocolate with a mixture of the two fillings).  

Of course, we were meant to pick up and drive this cake to the wedding, so admittedly that was harrowing.  It was a lot of screaming and “WHY IS THE ROAD BUMPY??” but the cake was perfectly fine.  

Given that this cake was a post-apocalyptic cake… with flowers?  We were a little confused when we first picked it up.  

But I love the topsy turvy shape, and that’s all that really mattered to me in the end. 

This same woman was able to make vegan cupcakes, gluten free cupcakes, AND sugar free cookies for all our guest’s dietary needs. 

 

We had the place make special labels for each item, both here and for the buffet.   

They stated what the item is and what ingredients were used.   Super useful right?  

Except for that one where they totally failed.  

Not entirely getting the point led to our planner-lady interrupting me while I was getting food to say, “OH you don’t want that!”   

At first I was like, “Is this bitch calling me fat on my goddamn wedding day???”  Turn out, there was a last minute change to the menu, and one item had… something? 

Dude, if you can’t do what I asked you to do, just cut it out.  DO NOT endanger people by having the once useful sign now functionally worthless.  

Given my food-phobias that I was really super determined not to freak out about that particular day *BREATHES* I was furious, and scared.  I managed to still eat macaroni, but I didn’t actually eat anything else.  Anything.  Because she ruined it.  She burned my hard earned trust away.  It was gone.

…

Okay, “ruined” might take it a bit far.  The party was still awesome and continues to be talked about as, “The Best Wedding Ever” so suck it!
We even got to dress the bartenders up as mad scientists!  Did I mention that?

Every wedding has those oh-my-god-no moments, and ours went pretty well by the end.

Sooo I would still recommend the venue, warts and all.

Testing the Skinny on the Skin Test Conclusion

Before I begin this particular post, I'd like to state that I did this to myself.  I chose to put myself in a situation where I was facing my allergy phobia in order to hopefully start a treatment for lessening my allergy burden.  

This was not easy, and yes, it was uncomfortable. 

However, I fully support people getting a skin test in order to get allergy shots, or to go on the drops, which I'm already on for my bazillion food allergies.

Mind you, they don't work for everything.  I probably will always have a couple deadly food allergies, but the idea is to lessen the overall load.  Becoming more tolerant to some things allows the body to chill a little bit about the more dangerous ones.  

I even had my mom and my Knight in Pinstripes right there with me.  Rob drew things for me:

With all that said, yes, I was stuck with a thousand needles and it was terrifying.  

In fact, Rob drew that too: 

However, obviously, I did not die.  
 
I even had a panic attack at one point, but managed to somehow stifle it into a series of stupid jokes.  

One of which was actually, "Well, I'm not dead.  So, you know, that's better than I thought would happen." 

Rob illustrated my emotional journey: 

The constant joking and being silly while clearly exaggerating was partly to calm myself down, but also to make sure the nice lady giving the test wouldn't feel bad.  Then, consequently, when she laughed, I felt like it wasn't a huge deal either.  

This entire "personal story" aspect of this blog has a lot to do with the power of reshaping our stories and finding humor and beauty where there is otherwise pain.

Now then... 

The day went pretty smoothly.  My mom picked me up from my apartment to take me to my parent's house.  Rob was at work in the morning, but took the afternoon off just to be supportive. 
*Insert proud grin*  
Meeting at my parent's house just wound up easier than meeting at the doctor's office, with it's three or four waiting rooms and such.  

I spent my morning desperately trying to ignore how nervous I was, and did this by doing the following:

1.) Playing stupid dress up games online, including games that allow a person to have careers.  Some of these careers are easy enough to really have, while others are almost impossible to get in real life.

2.) Staring at my toys and thinking about ways they could do a whole television series of just the minions from Despicable Me.

I freaking love those guys.

3.) Eating bacon and eggs, lovingly prepared by my momma, 'cause I'm an adult.

 There are very few foods that don't freak me out, and bacon is one of the consistently "safe" foods for me.  I can't even explain why.  
A lot of the foods I go to are heavily processed and probably inherently unhealthy on some level or another, but having no allergies to preservatives or dyes and ALL the allergies to organic foods on their own anyway...  
I just don't care.  
If I'll eat it, awesome.  

Rob showed up, we hung out for a bit, and then we were off! 

When my name was called, my heart dropped into my stomach, but knowing I had some support made me breathe again.  
At that point, Mom had Dad on the phone, who was asking for a play-by-play.  If everyone had their way, that tiny room would have been filled with people.  I felt very loved.  

The first part of the test was on my left upper arm and did not involve any needles.  
It was maybe a third of the size it was supposed to be, because I asked to not test for any foods.  I'm already on the drops for specifically food allergies, so it would have been a waste of resources and my patented Rowyn-panic. 

This was just a tray of tiny pokey things on top of the skin, yet the reaction to a couple of them was instantaneous.  

She had marked where the first tray would start with a little heart, so sideways, the first to react (grasses) looked like a little face.  

Rob and I both drew what it looked like:

 His was somehow more accurate: 

"I am the grasslord" 

Yes you are.

The left arm slowly got more and more itchy, though most of the dots of allergens didn't react at all.  That's a good thing.  

The ones that DID react, however... 

And then came the right arm.  

OH MY CRAP.  

So many tiny little needles.  I tried to just not look.  

Mostly, it didn't hurt.  ...I was still afraid though.  I think I kept it in check well.  I was told later that despite me openly stating my crippling fear, I apparently handled it like a pro.  

Rob drew some stuff during this whole right arm process, like the Cheshire Cat telling me to relax:

And his way of telling me I was very brave for facing my fear: 

He actually printed out a certificate of "Bravery at the Doctors" for me to frame on the wall.  He even signed and dated the thing. 

By the end of my twitches, wincing, and bad jokes, my right arm looked like this: 

Rob expected me to just pass out once the adrenaline wore off, and I'm surprised that I didn't.  
Instead, I just wanted to eat and not be touched ever again.

Back at my parent's house, my father told me that Batman himself had heard about my appointment and how brave I was, and had asked him to give me an awesome Bat-signal magnet.  

Yes, I'm 27.  
Shut up.
I'm the goddamn Batman.  

Later, "chicken for dinner" turned into this:

Oh, you mentioned a food in passing?  LETS HAVE THAT TOO.

...My broccoli isn't drawn well.  

...That's broccoli in the middle on the bottom there. 

...

Anyhoo, then Rob and I went back home.  

I cuddled up in my robe, going from itchy and awake to exhausted and a little dizzy.

It wasn't horrible, but the ick came in waves.

To get my mind off the crap of it, Rob played American McGee's Alice: Madness Returns so I could watch it like a cartoon.  

It's a pretty game. 

I wasn't going to sleep at a reasonable time that night, and I wound up hungry again.  Rob, being amazingly Rob-like, scrambled an egg for me.  

I'm going to be pretty freaked out the first few times I get the allergy shots.  However, I've been on the drops for forever, and I'd be getting the shots in a safe setting, surrounded by doctors and epi-pens.  

I was told the red dots from the test would be there a few days, and a day later, they are almost entirely gone.  Clearly, I'll be able to handle it.  

I have a year to decide.  After that year, I'll need to be tested again, and that's crappy, so screw it.  I'll do the shots. 

Now to figure out my insurance!  

Testing the Skinny on The Skin Test

As anyone who has been keeping up with this blog can tell you, I'm allergic to…

Well, everything.


I'm allergic to grasses and trees and an assortment of foods…

No medications, as far as I know, though I am sensitive to laughing gas enough that it'll give me panic attacks.

Either way, I was on the road to having to live my life inside some horrible bubble, never to interact with another person again. 

To a certain extent, I actually did this to myself when I first came home again, but that was more due to a budding mental illness and less due to a physical ailment of any kind. 

So, a bazillion years ago, I was put on the drops.  Sublingual allergy drops work like the shots, in that it helps my body slowly learn to not be afraid of these substances.  Much like a ninja building up an immunity to poison by ingesting just a little bit over a long period of time, eventually, the body stops over reacting so much. 

That's all allergies are.

It's the body overreacting.

In this sense, it is perfect that I would have so many allergies.

To get this medication though, I had to take an allergy test. 

Not like this.

Not even a blood test. 

It's a skin test. 

I bring this up because I'm having the skin test done again to see if anything has changed.  Hopefully it has, and hopefully it's changed in a positive way.

Blood tests are useful because you can test for a lot of things all at once without any direct risk to the person being tested. The problem is that they aren't always particularly accurate.

The skin test is VERY accurate. 

You'd think that would make it worth it.

I bring this all up because not only have I had the test before, but I'm about to have it again in a couple of weeks.

I'm dreading this.

Obviously, I survived last time.  The problems are that
A. It's uncomfortable and I've become a flighty ninny who flips shit and thinks she's dying every time she even has a strange itch or needs to cough for a second. 
B. I'm worried about my tattoos because it makes little bumps which can spread onto the arms and sometimes they go to the back…
C. I don't really want to know if it's gotten worse. I want to somehow ONLY be told if it's better, and
D. I now associate the test with humiliation. 

This post will mostly be about that last one.

As jumpy and panic ridden as I may be now, when I was a kid, I just bottled everything.  I'd either be perfectly pleasant and happy, or I was a ball of silent misery.  Typically, that misery came about when I wasn't being left well enough alone. 

I didn't like attention, especially from strangers, and I didn't like the idea of ever smiling when I didn't have a reason to do so.  This led to a lot of people thinking I didn't have a sense of humor. I had one, just not when I felt embarrassed or like I was the butt of the joke. 

I'll tangent for a moment here because the other time this sort invasion of space was a problem was when I had a mat cut out of my hair.

Instead of just cutting the damn thing out themselves, my parents took me to a hair stylist, hoping he or she could take it apart and not have to cut out a chunk of hair.  It was underneath anyway, so I gave no shits.

Apparently my hair makes an amazing accidental dred.  It was perfect enough that the woman being paid to slice it off instead opted to call her friends and random patrons over to gaze upon the atrocity under my hair. 

Mind you, this was my own damn fault because my hair was unruly and I didn't like it being brushed.

Eventually, she cut it out of my hair, but not before I was in tears, hating the world, feeling hideous.  In retrospect, it was a compliment, but I just felt like a freak show at the time.

Similarly, there was the allergy test.

It was either tomato or wild North American grass that enveloped my shoulder in an itchy red mass of hate…

But what was worse was the thing on my hip.

"Dust" mutated into this horrible patch on my left hip which resembled…

A bunny.

I had a goddamn dust buddy on my butt.

Dust

Bunny

on my

BUTT.

And so the world had to be shown. 

The next half an hour was spent with nurses, doctors, patients, small children and everyone under the sun laughing at my rabbit-ass while I sat itchy, embarrassed, and once again hating the world. 

And now I'm going to have this test done again. 

I'm still just as prideful as I ever was as a child, but now I'm panicky and vocal. 

This might not end well. 

Duck Season, Rabbit Season, Allergy Season

As you may know by now, I'm allergic to everything.

This season is particularly bad and it is affecting every part of my body.

Even my hair looks particularly shitty for no reason:

And then, of course, I'm just constantly leaking:

In fact, by this point, it's less my nose and eyes and more my ears:
 

I am so very attractive!

Between that and the puffiness and the dry skin, I wind up feeling like I look like a Cro-Magnon made out of clay:

A week ago, I was at my friend's house for gaming.
I like to roll dice and hit imaginary things.

The problem was that allergies had hit me HARD and I wasn't willing to take an antihistamine.  My logic was that we game pretty late anyway and I'm always half unconscious by the end of it.  I didn't want to add to that by being half asleep from the beginning.

So, I decided to tough it out.  This meant bringing a trash bag and a roll of toilet paper for my snot:

I actually went through that whole roll in a couple days.  So much snot.

The other side effect of not being entirely prepared for my seasonal allergies is that I got loopy:

 

And then passed out anyway:

 


In fact, I was so very loopy at this game that my roll of toilet paper became my favorite toy.  This happened because I realized when it was smooched, it was smiling:

Then, I managed to somehow dissect it, taking out it's cardboard to create a stand:

This was also, at one point, a hat.  …Later on, Rob also used it as a hat almost instinctively.  Yes I <3 that man of mine.

Speaking of my Knight in Pinstripes, he considers himself to be immunize to any damage.  He proudly states this often and every time he does, I think an anvil is going to cartoonishly fall on his head and break his whole body just to prove some Karmic point.  It has not done this so far.

However, he is an ex-smoker.  This means his face used to be pretty much clogged with random chemicals and he wasn't breathing so well, but he was used to it.  Now that he can breathe and smell, suddenly places he used to tolerate and parties that were bearable are now just as utterly disgusting to him as they are to the rest of us.  On top of that, now he suffers from seasonal allergies.

He is a little like Captain Hammer in that since he doesn't generally experience physical discomfort, it's a big freaking deal when he does.

So when he started to have a few cold-like symptoms from allergies, he flipped out and kept asking if he had a fever.  He acted like he might be dying. 

Mind you, his symptoms were over in a couple days.  Me?  I've been having migraines, my body and my mind are all affected.  Of course, I'm also allergic to everything.

It seems the big culprits affecting people this year are mostly:

Dust is not such a big deal for me.  My indoor allergies are not NEARLY as bad as my seasonal outdoor allergies, and those in turn are not as bad as a couple of my food allergies.  Still, there is something to be said about the overall allergy load.

If I'm already having a set of reactions from one thing, I don't want to add to that.  My immune system is already in over drive.  It winds up like the straw that broke the camel's back.

...
 

By the end of this season, I typically have just melted into a puddle of semi-recognizable goo:

BUT!  In this crappy allergy season, at least I'm not suffering alone!


*cry*

This Post Brought to You By: Collaboration!

My Knight and I went to a tiny con this past weekend.  BadCon at UAlbany.  It was not a "bad con" but there was hardly anyone there.  I'm hoping to help out with spreading the word next year.  Still, we sold some things and met some people and saw some friends.  Mostly, we sat around doodling together.  This was like a dream date for me, as it turns out.

My Knight, Rob, draws people as potatoes.  They show up in his webcomic on occasion here:   http://www.unmedicatedcomic.com/
and he'll draw people at cons as potatoes.  I was highly entertained by this, so I decided to draw him as a potato.  ...But it didn't wind up as cute as his do.

Also, everything scanned for this had gotten a little wet because A. it was raining afterwards and B. we had a spill.  The spill was entertaining in it's own right because while our drawings got a little wet, everything else on the table was saved by the tablecloth itself. 

Since part of that looked like a face, my Knight drew the spill:

...I need a better editing program for my scanner so you kids can see these better. 

To give you an idea of the kinds of stuff sold at these events, we sell art prints, sometimes T-shirts, key chains and assorted body parts:

"Give someone the finger!"  Get it??

At one point, we took two words, put them together and then saw what we each came up with.  First was fish-apple:

His:

Mine (Which I think wound up more frog-like than fish-like.  ...Or maybe just sick):

Then came centipede and barrel.
His:

Mine:

and another try:

I also attempted to show the difference between antennae and penises.  ...I don't remember why.  But here they are:

Now, to conclude, I'm going to express how head over heels I am for this guy.

I don't do outside.

I just don't.

I think of the outside world and I think of the "tweezers" my mom has handed me when I wanted to pluck my eyebrows, knowing those things are for plucking off bugs and out splinters and other horrible outside things.

Seriously.  The fuck are these things?


I'm allergic to outside.  Literally.  Grass makes me itchy and red.

YET I went out by his family's house so he could show me where he spent his childhood days, by rusty pieces of metal and now overgrown thorns... And even with a busted hip from before then and even while stressed out of my mind and ridden with silent panic attacks, I still managed to have a good time.

Why?

Because he was with me.

...Also some of the plants did neat things like this:

Twisty and there's that curl thing at the bottom. 

Because I really never go outside, knowing that I do have some pretty amazingly bad allergies, when I do go outside, I feel a little like a kid in a bubble.  I'm stupefied by the beauty of it all, and TERRIFIED by any little prick of anything at all. 
I used to run into the woods as a kid and climb trees.  I'd walk over rocks and not complain when I got wet in a creek. 
Then 12 years old happened and the learned-the-hard-way-knowledge of what an allergen can do kind of ruined my life and ended what bit of a childhood I had. 

I'd like to go back to being that kid.  I'm not as brave as I used to be, but maybe with the help of my Knight, I'll get there. 

...that being said, I really DO have allergies, so it can't be all the time anyway. 
Still, worth a shot once in a while, yeah?