No More Shrimp?!?!?

     Did you ever wake up in the morning and just know something was wrong?  With your FACE?  Bad feeling.  I don't know about you, but I've reached the age where I spend a few minutes upon waking each morning to take an accounting of the vessel.  First, I give thanks that I didn't wake up dead.  Good news!  Next, I go through my checklist of regular aches and pains to see how they're all doing, and then I very carefully travel mentally from head to toe to see if anything new has raised its ugly head in the night.  

     Well, about a week ago, I was tallying up the daily score when I sensed that something wasn't right on the old kisser.  Specifically, the left side seemed out of whack when I wiggled my mouth around.  So I placed hand to face and -- YIKES! -- my left cheek was swollen up like I'd had a wisdom tooth removed!  I raced to the bathroom mirror, only to confirm the worst -- I looked like Alvin the Chipmunk storing acorns for the winter.  Great look.  GREAT look.  Sadly, there was no time to address the troubling issue at that point, so off to work I went looking pitiful.  The good news is that by the end of the day, all was back to normal.  Ahhhhhhh.

     THEN, three days later when I awakened, I didn't even need to take the daily accounting to know something was wrong.  First, my right hand and wrist were swollen, and I could barely see out of my right eye.  Another trip to the bathroom mirror again confirmed bad news -- my eye was swollen almost shut.  What the heck?????  I climbed back into bed to spend a little time feeling sorry for myself, during which I recapped the last few days, and suddenly a culprit came to light.  I realized that the night before each swelling incident, I had eaten shrimp!  Now, I love shrimp, I've eaten them all my life without an ounce of difficulty, and the thought of suddenly not being able to do so was disheartening, to say the least.  But just to be sure, I took my one good hand and one open eye to the computer and searched the Internet for information on food allergies.  Sure enough, I learned that it is not at all uncommon to develop a sudden allergy to shrimp or other shellfish later in life.  (I hate that phrase, "later in life."  I realize that I can no longer consider myself "early in life," but have a heart.)  Fortunately, treatment for mild allergies is fairly simple -- antihistamines will usually do the trick.  The BETTER news, however, is that though this kind of allergy often manifests itself following the ingestion of any kind of shellfish, I had already inadvertently conducted a test that concluded that was not the case for me.  One evening between the two shrimp-swelling incidents, my husband surprised me with soft-shell crabs -- not just my favorite fruit from the sea but something I love so much that, in my humble opinion, life without soft-shell crabs would just barely be worth living.  Just BARELY.  But I cooked those bad boys and ate every morsel and absolutely nothing was amiss the next morning.  Good news!

     So now I'm back to square one with the shrimp.  I need to test the allergy theory, but I certainly don't want to eat a half pound of shrimp cocktail to do it.  A friend of mine tells me she's also allergic to shrimp, but only if she touches raw ones.  After they're cooked, she can pick them up, eat them, rub them all over her body if she wants to, without any ill effects.  Could that be the case for me?  I'm planning my approach as we speak, and I'll keep you posted on my results.  Meanwhile, anybody else have an allergy to shrimp or other shellfish?  What do you do?  

     Why couldn't I have developed an allergy to TOFU??????