Had this for a year and it's a huge pain in the neck. Mercifully, my levels dropped to zero after a year and I was declared clear, but I'm now ultra-paranoid ab

Had this for a year and it's a huge pain in the neck. Mercifully, my levels dropped to zero after a year and I was declared clear, but I'm now ultra-paranoid about ticks when going outside. I nearly died from it while discovering I had it: had a cheeseburger for dinner and woke up in the middle of the night covered in hives and then collapsed in anaphylaxis. One emergency room trip later (apparently my BP dropped to 'how are you still breathing' levels briefly) I was back on my feet, but I spent the ensuing year scrutinizing food for mammal contributions. I found them in surprising places: that soup at the Chinese restaurant flavored with pork fat (glad I asked first!), the vitamins and medications in gelatin capsules, the chicken wings fried in beef fat. The annoying thing about this is that it's extremely variable. The allergist I saw is one of the names on the early studies of this, and has been seeing patients throughout the southeast with it for the last twenty or so years. He's seen people that reacted violently if Wendy's didn't change the fryer oil, and other patients that barely reacted unless they had a steak. He even had one cattle farmer who would react to eating anyone's cattle except his own, to which he didn't react at all.