Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Just a pinch.

I've come to a horrifying and soul-crushing revelation this evening, been dealt a scar that may hear physically, but never emotionally. I believe I may be allergic to onions.

There's a bit of a history to this. The first time I realized something was wrong was at a birthday being held for the father of my dear friend Jason. They were serving hamburgers off the grill, so I nabbed one and proceeded to apply the three same things to it that I always do; lettuce (only the green leafy part, fuck that crunchy white shit), a bit of ketchup, and of course, a copious amount of sweet yellow onion. Onion, you see, is the ultimate thing to put on a hamburger (not to mention almost any other savory meat dish). If you feel I need to provide more reasons as to why the onion is king, you probably won't end up sharing my passion, anyways.

I got the slight inkling something was off with the first bite I took. The delicious onion taste seemed to linger in my mouth longer than usual, and I felt an odd itching on the roof of my mouth. The itching masked a soreness that felt to me to be otherwordly. I have never had any sort of allergic reaction to any food of any kind. When I abandoned vegetarianism in high school (made it two years), the return of meat to my system barely registered, and was in no way uncomfortable. This considered, I wrote the odd pain off as an anomaly.

Tonight, however, was a bit different. Jason and I were fulfilling a tradition of ours. We enjoy trout. When he's in town, we'll end up snagging a few trout from the seafood counter and frying them at my apartment. We've had varying and interesting degrees of success, perhaps the least fortunate outcome being when, for lack of oil, we attempted to fry the fish in salsa. It did work, mind you, but it wasn't terribly smooth. Regardless, Jason shares a few of my culinary tastes, so we decided tonight to stuff the fish with sliced onions while they fried. It's a genius tactic, mind you, because the onion taste cooks into the fish, while the onions themselves are sauteed in the oil (in this case in butter).

The trout ended up being as delicious as expected. I ate the whole thing over the course of fifteen minutes while watching the end of the Hornets/Spurs game on TNT (by the way, am I the only person who thinks Gregg Popovich doesn't get called out enough for being a sore loser? Listen to him get snippy in his postgame interviews. What a fuckin' baby...), as well as every bit of onion that was packed inside. I had noticed the familiar soreness on the roof of my mouth, but thought little of it, perhaps because I'm a moron. Within five minutes of finishing the meal, though, I was burning up.

My head felt tingly and I had an uneasy warmth in my stomach. My legs and arms felt weakened somehow, and an immense, exhausted gloom fell over me. When I explained the series of feelings to Jason, he immediately guessed food allergy, which wasn't good since he's a man very familiar with them. I ended up lying on the couch sweating quietly for a couple hours before starting to feel better. Even now, four hours later, I feel peculiar and uncomfortable.

Tomorrow I'll have to eat a little red onion and see how I do. This is deeply worrisome to me, especially since I'd always prided myself on my ability to take a bite of an onion as if it were an apple, without batting an eye. Odd thing to be proud of? Certainly! But when you're not a great dancer, you take what you can get.

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