Don't Kill the Birthday Girl (6 page)

I used to wonder if I was the only one tempted to overdose. As I grew older and began meeting other people with allergies, we would crack wise on our membership in the cult of Benadryl carriers. There is no diplomatic way of asking, “So, did you ever think about taking a whole handful at once?”

Only as the world has become Googlable do I find them out there: The high school basketball player who died with a mixture of Benadryl and rubbing alcohol in his stomach. A paper on “pediatric intravenous catheter abuse,” published after a child with long-term illness drained the powder from Benadryl capsules into her IV. And I wonder how many other kids, afraid they will always be at odds with the rest of the world, take a Benadryl or maybe two or maybe three—only to have nothing worse come of it than cotton mouth and a hellishly difficult time getting up for school the next morning.

That night, my mom went to bed after the news, but I stayed up to watch the
Tonight Show
. After the
Tonight Show
I watched the
Late Show
. Then the even later show. Then an infomercial starring Cher. Finally the station showed the American flag waving, while playing a prerecorded version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” followed by the blare of off-air static. By then I could barely keep my eyes open. I returned to my room and crawled straight under the covers. The pills, which I'd lined up along the foot of my moon-and-stars bedspread, scattered onto the floor.

•  •  •

When I was younger, eating outside the house was a family affair. My mother knew my allergies better than I did, so she did the ordering. No matter how careful we were, there were dozens of evenings derailed by attacks: my mother breaking out the Benadryl, my father interrogating the chef, and—if pills didn't work—driving to a hospital where we could hang out in the ER lobby until my airway opened up again.

“Just breathe,” my father told me on one outing as I curled up in his lap, apologizing over and over for wasting our tickets to an art exhibit, a trip we had planned for weeks with my grandparents. “Calm down. Just breathe.”

Even in high school, when friends took to dinner-and-movie nights, I stayed wedded to the three-person unit that managed what I ate and took care of me when something went wrong. In my parents' absence I might order French fries, and there was one—one—Japanese restaurant near school where I could trust the vegetable and chicken tempura. But that was it. Nothing else was worth the risk.

You can't make it through college on four years of potatoes. So before I took up residence on the grounds of the University of Virginia, my parents arranged a meeting with a supervisor who shared the entire index of the recipes used in UVA's cafeterias. “We'll take care of her,” she promised.

The reality was less promising. I'd venture to the dining hall and watch servers use tongs to pass out corn bread, then use those same tongs to serve me an ear of corn. I'd look down at a plate now contaminated with buttermilk crumbs, shake my head, get a new plate, and start again. Theoretically, the university had pledged to my parents that Aramark would have a “safe protein” available at every dinner shift. The “safe protein”
in question turned out to be completely unseasoned cod. Two slabs. Every time.

Part of the problem was that the dining hall was open for three-hour stretches; neither the staff nor I knew when I would arrive from day to day. Sometimes no one had remembered to defrost the fish and fire the plate, meaning a twenty-minute wait before it could be ready (an eternity in college time). More often the dish had been nuked, cling-wrapped, and stashed under a heat lamp at least an hour before I arrived. As I peeled off the covering, a stream of fishy, lukewarm condensation would run onto my plastic tray. The flesh would be rubbery to the touch.

“My god,” someone at the table would say. “What is that?”

The day that broke me was when I walked in to hear a man in a plastic hairnet call back into the kitchen, “Yo, the fish girl's here!”

I took to dishing up white rice instead, ladled with chickpeas from the salad bar. But that worked only if I got to the salad bar before other students had contaminated the bins with drips of ranch dressing, which always seemed to slop out of the ladle as it was poured, or shreds of cheddar cheese. When that happened, my refuge was a bowl of dry Corn Pops. I had to suck on them before chewing so they didn't scrape the roof of my mouth. My allergies took one of dorm life's great culinary gifts—breakfast for dinner—and rendered it punitive.

Facing these culinary disasters, I couldn't resist taking a chance on the recipe du jour from time to time, asking first if it was Sandra-friendly. My first semester at school, on the first weekend my long-distance boyfriend came to visit, I was trying to impress him with how well I'd acclimated to being away from home. When he said the risotto looked good, I asked the
server if it had any dairy in it. She assured me it didn't. I got a heaping plateful.

“They take good care of me here,” I bragged. I don't know why I thought eating risotto would impress him. Maybe I was just afraid he wouldn't kiss me if I had cod breath. If I'd known the very definition of risotto stipulates cheese stirred into the rice as it cooks, I wouldn't have touched it. But I'd never heard of risotto. It looked like vegetables in rice, not that different from what I assembled myself via the salad bar.

My tongue told another story. On the first bite, strands of cheese (which I realized was what I had seen stretching from rice to fork) formed a strychnine web across the back of my throat. I took a long sip of water, continuing my serene chatter about classes as I assessed the damage. My boyfriend knew better than to believe my calm.

“Sandra?” he asked. “You okay?”

This was how I learned that an ambulance squad can reach any building on UVA's grounds in ten minutes, using paved shortcuts specifically designed for quick access. They came in with a wheelchair. Though my vision was blurring, and I felt woozy, I refused. I was not going to be seen being carted out of Newcomb Hall.

“Just use the chair,” my boyfriend pleaded. But instead I marched out of the dining hall on my own feet, with my boyfriend and a four-person EMS crew behind me.

“Slow down!” said the tech wheeling the chair.

No way. I was hoping that if I walked fast enough, people would not realize they were there with me. In my mind, this was like some slow-motion Scorsese chase scene. Odds are that
the tech was no more than a foot behind me, poised to catch me in case I collapsed backward.

The sequence that followed was one that would become familiar in the four years to come: Landing in the waiting room of the University of Virginia hospital, with its drooping potted palms and out-of-date copies of
Sports Illustrated
. Getting a dirty look from the father of a six-year-old with a broken arm, who had been waiting for an hour, while I went straight in—potential anaphylaxis goes to the top of the triage list. Refusing an IV, because I dread the bruise, followed by a lecture on refusing IVs. Benadryl, Zyrtec, and hours of lonely, bored, not-allowed-to-fall-asleep waiting on an ER cot while my boyfriend, equally lonely and bored, waited in the lobby. A man on the other side of the curtain kept whimpering about his leg.

The next time I went to the dining hall, they put out the plate of fish before I even had a chance to ask.

I sometimes took the bus to Harris Teeter for groceries. But I had nowhere to keep food, nowhere to cook it, and no money to spend. Besides, for the first time in my life, staying in to eat was no protection from the reach of dairy. My roommate was a nice Montana girl who liked pizza. Sometimes she'd talk on the phone while eating a slice. If I used the same phone to make a call, even hours later, oil left on the receiver raised hives all along my chin and cheek.

This led to an awkward lecture about keeping surfaces clean. In every dorm, someone gets stuck with the lame roommate assignment. Once you have uttered the phrase “baby wipes” to another eighteen-year-old, face it: you are that lame roommate.

Whenever my mother heard about these reactions, she was furious on my behalf. One morning, I explained I had missed her phone call the night before because I'd been inadvertently exiled from our suite, when my roommate popped buttered popcorn in the microwave next to my bed. She told me to be more assertive. “This is a matter of life and death,” she said. “They have to understand that.”

But I wanted so badly to be something other than the fussy one. Four years of college and countless reactions never quashed the dream that I could be just another UVA 'Hoo, in all her sloppy glory.

At a postgraduation beach week, my drunken housemates decided to turn beer pong into “White Russian pong,” sending a spray of milk and Kahlúa into the air every time someone plunked a Ping-Pong ball into a Solo cup. I didn't object. I stood by, cheering for a team, not touching anything, hoping for the best.

After an hour, so much milk had been splashed about that I started to react. On autopilot, I ordered my boyfriend to drive to a nearby ER, where I hung out in the lobby, waiting for the Benadryl to work. He settled in and watched cable TV. I lay down on a scratchy couch nearby, stared at the ceiling, and tried to relax.

I didn't fit in anyone's lap anymore. No one knew to say “Breathe. Just breathe.” The protective bubble of life with my family had burst, and I was on my own.

CHAPTER THREE

Eat, Drink, and Be Wary

R
ituals mark every life. Traditions and celebrations affirm membership in a group or provide comfort in daily repetition or declare passage from one stage to the next. Yet the reality is that my eighteenth birthday party didn't make me an adult. Nor did graduating from college. Even when I moved into my first postcollege apartment, with my dad as a cosigner on the lease, I felt like a kid playing dress-up.

But learning that my best friend Kristen was getting married finally dropped the anvil of adulthood on my head. Not just a best friend but
the
best friend—the one I'd had for ten years, who'd watched me cry over my high school sweetheart; the one with whom I shared an invented code consisting of the words
bob, funk, derf
, and, on special occasions,
pampelmousse
. How had the volunteer fireman our friends had teased Kristen about
transmogrified into the future father of her children? Where did that leave me?

That left me in a booth of St. Maarten Café, celebrating to the tune of “Another One Bites the Dust.” Four of us had gathered on a Friday night in Charlottesville, Virginia, on the Corner, the strip of bars we had frequented back as UVA undergrads. Not too froufrou, not too grimy, Maarten's—as the students call it—is the kind of tavern where regular visits earn you a mug with your name inscribed on the bottom. Kristen liked to order the bananas Foster, complete with flaming ice cream. Eric and Dave preferred the loaded waffle fries, buried under a layer of melted cheese. I planned to do my part by getting a round of shots for all.

While they deliberated about the food, I scrutinized the laminated place mat that doubled as a drink menu, looking for something Sandra-friendly that didn't contain Irish cream, Midori, or chocolate. The house specialties cater to someone who has the sweet tooth of a five-year-old and the sense of humor of a fifteen-year-old. No other explanation justifies the Buttery Nipple.

“What about Lemon Drops?” I asked my friends. Vodka, with a sugar-rimmed glass and a wedge of lemon afterward. Sweet, simple, and wickedly effective. My parents had not raised a lightweight. As my mother had once said, “We're just glad you can enjoy
something
fun.”

When the waitress brought out a quartet of shot glasses, the vodka looked a little cloudy. But some bartenders add a squeeze of lemon, and I wasn't going to make everyone wait while I asked questions. Rail vodka is drinkable only as long as it is ice
cold, and already our fingertips were melting away the frost on each small glass.