I was Patient Zero — at least in the Northeast, I believe. Long before the bite of a lone star tick was discovered to trigger an allergy to meat in humans, my case was an oddity, so strange in fact that I was once included in a morning television segment about people with weird reactions to certain foods.
My first attack was in New York City in the early 1990s. A friend and I had shared a pepperoni pizza for lunch but by the late afternoon, I broke out in giant hives and felt a slight constriction in my throat. I was able to buy some over-the-counter allergy medicine nearby, then, perhaps stupidly, I got in my pickup to head home to East Hampton. I pulled off the Long Island Expressway somewhere in Queens and took a nap. Some time later, I woke up, threw up by the side of the service road, and continued east.
It was years before my reactions were traced to meat and years more until the tick connection was discovered. My guess is that I had contracted it while working on an archaeology site in coastal Georgia while in college. Lone stars did not make it this far north until the early 2000s.
Despite seeing a top allergy doctor at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, it was all guesswork. Sulfites in wine and canned foods were the leading suspects. Only after a violent attack after eating a lot of Christmas ham did the meat connection become clear — to me and my city doctor, at least. A local allergy specialist scoffed when first told about my experiences; she is now widely considered an expert on the subject.
There have been a few close calls. After getting a vaccine update in about 2001, I went into anaphylaxis while riding the subway uptown. I had several EpiPens by then, but had left them where I was staying in the East 80s.
A man seated nearby was working on the word puzzle Jumble, and I thought briefly that I should ask to borrow his pen to write on my arm what was happening in case I went down. But allergies make me, at least, stupider than normal — at 42nd Street, the express pulled in, and I forgot about the pen and stumbled across the platform. By the time I got off the number 5 train, I could barely speak.
Since then, I have had about one or two attacks a year, always accidents, such as receiving mu shu pork instead of chicken from the takeout joint. These days, nearly everyone who sets foot in the woods seems to have alpha-gal.