Allergy Woes

I have known for quite some time that I'm allergic to seafood, of which the most common instance would be prawns. The realisation dawned on me after allergy attacks on four very disparate occasions, among which the only common factor had been prawns. On the first occasion it had been my maternal uncle's daughter's marriage reception at Behala, on the second it had been at my father's friend's niece's reception at ITC Sonar Bangla near Science City, on the third it was a dinner with my prospective husband and in-laws at Marco Polo in China at Park Street and the final one again with my in-laws at a friends' family function in GC Block, Salt Lake. Four times seems too many to be a coincidence. Especially since each of the dishes containing prawn happened to be cooked in very different ways at each of these places. Weirdly enough,the ones we call kucho chingri (miniscule/tiny prawn) don't seem to affect me in a similar way. But I had such an alarm after the aforementioned occasions, when I had been rushing to the toilet almost every ten minutes to either throw up or throw down the unacceptable remains of the prawns in my body or writhing on the bed, clutching onto my stomach which would send out spasms of acute pain every few minutes that .... well....I've given up seafood for good. The very sight of prawns, whatever be their size or however exotic the dish, causes me to just look the other way. Even the ads of 'Red Lobster' on TV here, in fact, make me feel sick. Very sick.

However there seem to be other nasty surprises in store for me. I found out in a very painful way recently, that I'm allergic to other untried variants of seafood as well. The latest on the list has been tuna. I was heading for a whale of an allergy attack last Sunday night, which I stalled just in time by popping two LevoCetirizines and an anti-spasmodic pill. But there was too much discomfort and gastro-intestinal pain even after that to partake of any dinner. I went to bed hungry. I'm scared stiff right now. Don't think I'll be doing any sort of experimentation in the seafood domain for a long, long time to come.