Last week on Thursday, I ended up going home in the middle of the day due to becoming extremely ill very quickly. My head hurt, I was nauseous and I had developed this funny feeling in the back of my throat. All told, it reminded me very much of a migraine, except not. I’ve had a few migraines and this just seemed different somehow. I chalked it up to perhaps a migraine of a magnitude I’d never had before… until today.

This morning, all of my symptoms returned immediately after eating a piece of peanut butter toast. Every symptom… exactly as before, only more quickly. On Thursday, I had peanut butter but I’d forgotten because I had pizza immediately after (trying to curb hunger awaiting a pizza). I had two teaspoons of peanut butter and was eating the second as the pizza arrived. My symptoms began shortly after finishing my pizza and I just took some meds and assumed all would be well as usual. It wasn’t. I degraded quickly and felt I needed to leave right away due to how quickly the symptoms were progressing. I got home and went straight to bed and slept to ignore my symptoms. I slept for at least 3 hours. When I woke up… I really didn’t feel better. That’s when I began to suspect something else was happening (usually meds plus sleep ends a migraine for me), but I had no idea what it could be. (An aside - I had doubts about migraine due to the headache switching sides on me and sometimes being a full-on headache… other migraine sufferers will understand what I mean.)

Now, I know, this is not clinical – nor is it definitive, but I don’t believe in coincidence. I do plan to see an allergist to confirm this, but twice in one week with the same food source (two different jars of natural, organic peanut butter) leans strongly to evidence of an adult onset peanut allergy.

I love peanut butter… I will miss it terribly if I am, indeed, suddenly allergic to this food that I’ve eaten all of my life.