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fallen-drow · 8 years ago

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1: Alpha-gal and who I am Let’s press this bitch. Salutations! My name is Dorothy Jane Oliver-Finnegan and I am currently 26 years-young. Before we get too deep into my life, I want to issue a fair warning. I am blunt and honest. I don’t sugar-coat things because I believe it is a waste of time. I swear like a sailor and may be one of the most sarcastic people you meet. I’ll try to write sarcastic statements in Italics. Writing about me is difficult because I don’t know where to begin. So let’s begin with the basics: the start! “Humble” beginnings, if you will. I lived my first 7 years in Carmel, IN. For those of you not familiar with Carmel, IN: It’s a snobby town. Carmel has more money than it knows what to do with. Well that may not be true; they removed all of the 4-way stop signs and replaced them with roundabouts. Carmel also houses many of the government officials and other important people. For instance – my neighbors in Carmel were Former-Vice President Dan Quail (you know, the potato guy) and Mr. Simon. Mr. Simon owned the Pacers and all of the Simon Malls. But please don’t assume that I grew up wealthy, because I did not grow up with money. My house was a small white ranch, which was falling apart. It was my maternal grandparent’s home and where I spent most of my childhood. When I was 8, we moved to Noblesville, IN. Noblesville was an up and coming area. My mother works for a home-builder and her company built our home. We were the second house built in our subdivision and one of the biggest. The home in Noblesville was like a mansion compared to the home in Carmel. It has three floors, including a full basement. 7 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, Living, Family, Dining rooms, and a huge kitchen: the house is huge! I stayed in Noblesville until I went to college. I went to Manchester COLLEGE. They can call in a University all they want, but it will always be MC for me. I graduated in three years with a degree in Sociology with a concentration in Criminal Justice and a minor in Psychology. MC is in North Manchester, IN – which is 40 minutes southwest of Fort Wayne, IN. I lived there for 2 years after I graduated with my partner. Then we moved down to Spencer, IN. Spencer is 30 minutes northwest of Bloomington, IN. Currently, I live on 10 acres of wooded wonderland. I love the location of my current home and plan to live there until I’m an old lady. We currently have 20+ chickens, 4 dogs, 4 cats, and 1 fish. It’s my personal paradise. Other basic information: Height: 5’7 ½” Weight: Yeah right Favorites: Color: Royal Purple/Black Animal: Crow Food: Sushi Song: Mad World Past time: Sims 3, drawing, and gardening Show to watch: Reality/Game Shows Hair color: Naturally Brown, but I dye it often Eye color: Hazel – blue/green Okay, enough of that. Let’s talk about Galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose, or Alpha-gal. You can always Google what it means but basically: I’m allergic to ALL red meats. It can also be called Mammalian Meat Allergy (MMA). People with MMA have and overload of immunoglobulin E or IgE. That’s a big word. Let’s break it down. Any immunoglobulin is an anti-body. Immunoglobulin E is ONLY found in mammals. IgE is normally the lowest anti-body in your system, but it is responsible for the most intense reactions (hives, anaphylactic shock, etc.). So my blood is over-flowing with IgE and because of this I cannot eat red meat. IgE attacks the protein in the red meat and causes me to have severe allergic reactions. I’ll share some of my experiences later. What classifies as a red meat? Well just about everything besides poultry and fish. It does include: beef, pork, and any wild game. Pork is NOT the other white meat. I cannot have: steak, bacon, deer, rabbit, lamb, goat, and much more. But it’s not just red meat. It’s everything associated with red meat animals. I cannot have dairy either if it comes from a cow. No cheese, sour cream, cream cheese, buttercream frosting, caramel, ice cream, etc. Also most people allergic to pork are allergic to cats. Remember that I have four cats and four dogs? Well now, I’m allergic to them. My eyes itch and swell shut. I was playing with a kitten, and she licked my hand and scratched me: my whole hand, wrist, and forearm broke out in hives. When I tell people this, the normal reaction is: “Oh man that sucks!” or “No BACCON!?!?” For me it isn’t all that bad. When I was in college, I was vegan. It wasn’t until I hooked up with my wife that I started eating dairy and meat again. She got me with smoked Gouda. So I figured I’d go back to being vegan. Well, it’s not so easy when your best friend makes the MOST AMAZING smoked pork shoulder. Not to mention, we just bought a farm. We were going to get pigs and other animals for food. Now we have 10 beautiful acres, and no need to farm animals. The second question I get is how I knew to be tested for MMA. Well it all started when we moved down here. My wife and I are research fanatics. If we see something we don’t understand or don’t know. We’ll spend an entire day researching the topic and share what we have found with each other. This happened with ticks. When we bought our property, we went hiking and of course found a few ticks on us because we live in deer country. Then it was on like Donkey Kong. My wife and I spent hours and days researching ticks and the different types of ticks that live in our area. One of my wife’s good friends has Lyme disease. She lives in southern Indiana. So we wanted to protect ourselves. I found a red tick with a white dot on me. It wasn’t attached and I pulled it from my pants to look closer at it. I though the tick was oddly colored for being in the woods. Red would be an easy color for predators to find amongst all of the browns and greens. So I researched this little fella. Turns out it was a Lone Star Tick. Again you could Google all about this tick, but I’ll sum it up for you. Lone Star Ticks originated in Texas, but have migrated up the Mississippi River and are now in Indiana and the Midwest region of the United States. They do not transmit Lyme disease, but they transmit MMA. I thought this was interesting and remember it. Ya know, for Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit. And then something happened. The wife and I still have a home in North Manchester that we want to sell. So we went up there to get some things from the house. On the road, we stopped at a McDonald’s for some food. I don’t remember what I got, but I know it was probably a hamburger. A few hours after I ate it, I experienced the worst heart-burn ever. I thought I might be having a heart attack it was so painful. The pain lasted the rest of the night and I felt I couldn’t move. The next day, I assumed that the McDonald’s we went to had bad patties or something else made me sick. A few months later, we were at a friend’s house. She made tri-tip steak on the grill. It was delicious. A few hours later, we were sitting on their back deck and I noticed that I was covered in hives. I was itchy, struggled to breath, and continued to form more and more hives. My friend decided that she was going to “fix” me with a lot of apple crown and anti-itch lotion. Well, I could no longer feel my face, so it worked! I didn’t know what was happening. Later that night, I woke up in a panic because I couldn’t breathe. My wife stated that if I got worse she would take me to the ER. The next day, I was fine. Like nothing happened. I stopped eating ground beef after that, because it seemed that everything was revolving around ground beef. I continued on. I ate steak, but I cut all of the fat off because I was concerned that I was allergic to beef fat. I had no reactions. Then on September 24, 2016, I; my wife; and my mother went out to a restaurant and I ordered prime rib – rare. It was so good… We went home and I noticed that I had heart burn again. I blamed it on the horseradish. Then, I was covered in hives. I felt so sick. I couldn’t move. I scared my mom. She tried to do everything to make me better, but nothing was working. I then decided no beef at all. When I was vegan, one of my favorite snacks was/is Oreos. I love them. And like most people, I had a glass of milk. When I finished my Oreos, I drank my milk. Almost instantly, I started coughing. I could feel my throat closing. I was scared. Then I was covered in hives. More hives than ever before. I was one giant hive. I even had hives between my toes and in my mouth. I looked over to my wife for help. She didn’t know what to do. She fed me Benadryl and we went to bed. I remember struggling to breathe and thinking that I was going to die, but I didn’t want to scare my wife so I laid in silence. When I woke up the next day, I was sore and still covered in hives. It took me two days to recover. That’s when I made the appointment with the allergist. My tests came back positive for alpha-gal. My allergist was surprised that I knew what to look for and asked her to test me for something specific. Research does pay off. My allergist stated there are less than 3,000 reported cases in the United States of MMA. When I first discovered that I had this allergy, I was in shock. Then shock turned into anger and then sadness. I felt depressed. I love steak. I love prime rib. I love pork. I dislike chicken and turkey. I “like” fish. What was I going to do? My wife does not have MMA. She can eat whatever she wants. And I want her too. When we go out, she constantly apologizes for getting a steak, while I’m eating plain pasta. But she doesn’t have to suffer because I can’t eat what she can. I felt alone. Less than 3,000 people have this allergy. There is an online chat group, but it’s not something that helps me. I know what I can and cannot have. The people online just warn others about the dangers of soy intake and other issues that pop up. There is no cure. This allergy will last a life time. I will never “get better”. I have enough to worry about besides the fact that if I take in too much soy, I’m going to get ovarian cancer or breast cancer. My life will never be the same. But I’m optimistic. I’m hopeful. Nothing is doom and gloom. It’s gonna be okay. This is my journey with alpha-gal.

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