My girlfriend chewed strawberries while I watched. We’ve been together for five years and she’s never even touched one without a violent reaction. Yet, now she sits there, squishing them between her molars, red juice dribbling down her chin, softly smiling at me.
The last time she put the smallest fleck of a strawberry on her tongue, she went into anaphylactic shock. She almost died back then. That terrifying scene happened when we were sitting down to breakfast before work. We moved sluggishly after staying up until the wee hours of the morning the night before. So, when she reached for the Blueberry Oat Crunch cereal she must have missed the warning in the ingredients.
It said, May Contain Nuts And Other Berries.
She rubbed her eyes as she poured the cereal. Gasping, she stopped. She asked, “Did you check this?”
I told her, “Yeah.”
She breathed easy, saying, “Okay, cause my last EpiPen is dead.” Speaking in a joking kind of tone.
But it must have slipped my eye when I was at the market reading the box. I shouldn’t have smoked that joint before. She’s usually the one who goes shopping, I do other things around the house to make up for it, besides she likes to. I can’t stand it, I just take a few puffs before I do, and that’s what I did when I bought the stupid, fucking blueberry cereal.
At that breakfast table, before she went into shock, she poured the milk and she crunched into the cereal.
Minutes later, we were rushing down the highway toward the hospital in our car. Her face was blowing up red like she’d been stung by bees. She wheezed as she breathed. I was pressing the gas pedal into the floor and ripping through the glove box at the same time. Fast food coupons fell around her kicking legs. But all I found was an empty EpiPen. Tears streamed across our faces as we sped down the highway. She gripped me, her rasping breaths shortening. And at one point, she stopped breathing.
I screamed, “Wake up, wake up, wake up.”
She didn’t stir.
The hospital creeped into view. I rushed her into the emergency room. A nurse and a doctor took her away into double doors that blocked me from entry.
And I spent the next few hours slumped in a chair in that waiting room. With my head in my hands, I squinted through heavy, red eyes. I kept reading over the grocery list in my phone from that day. Reading over that one item on the list that could have saved us this whole ordeal, another one I missed, it said: EpiPen.
Luckily, she survived the trip to the hospital that day.
But today, she’s glaring at me across the breakfast table. She pops another strawberry in her mouth, chews on it, and the juice runs down her chin. And I feel a slight itching feeling at the back of my throat. She swallows the next strawberry whole. And it’s getting hard to breathe.