Job:

Allergic Living’s Gwen Smith: Julie, how did you first become aware of your child’s food allergies?

Julie Bowen: I was at work on Boston Legal and my husband was at home. He sent me a text saying, ‘I think we have a problem with our son and peanut butter.’ I said, ‘but he’s had it before,’ and then he said – ‘and he got stung by a bee’. And I was thinking, ‘What is going on over there?’

AL: You mean he was stung at the very same time he was reacting to peanut butter?

JB: Well, it is California and our doors are open all the time. So he [her son Oliver] had wandered out eating peanut butter and was stung by a bee. I was one to think this was no big deal until my husband sent me a picture of our son’s face, which was clearly in distress. It was swollen and disfigured.

My husband rushed him off to the emergency room and he was treated with epinephrine, and after that we learned that Oliver had allergies to all sorts of nuts and peanuts and probably also to stinging insects – but that’s a different series of tests.

After the anaphylactic reaction, I know that my job is to be aware and to be prepared for the next reaction – whenever that may be.

AL: These days you’re a big TV star, you’ve won a second Emmy and the show is a huge hit. But facing anaphylaxis, is that the great leveler?

JB: You know, I think being a parent is the great leveler. People often ask me how my life has changed since Modern Family. And I say, ‘Having three kids in three years was a much bigger change than having a lovely, lovely job.’

AL: What ages are your kids?

JB: Oliver is the older boy and we have twin 3-year-old boys. [So far, no life-threatening allergies have been diagnosed with the twins.]

Next: Bowen’s decision to get involved in the “Get Schooled in Anaphylaxis” campaign.

I can tell you exactly where I was when the field of allergy and immunology first stole my heart. I was in my first year of medical school sitting in an overly cool classroom taking notes as fast as any human hand could. My pathology lecture was just ending and immunology was up next. I rubbed my sore fingers and prepared to write down, verbatim, the next lecture.

But shortly after my professor started to speak, I realized that I had completely stopped taking notes. I had allowed myself to be drawn into the story that she was weaving, a story of T cells and B cells and their physical and chemical conversations with each other. It was amazing.

Little did I know that she was introducing me to a cast of cellular characters that would soon become not only important for me to pass my next immunology test, but also to complete my subsequent fellowship training and to my understanding of the mechanism of food allergy, an immunological disease that would affect three of my four children.

In 2005, after completing a pediatric residency, I started my fellowship in the field of allergy and immunology at the Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. I had a 7-week-old baby boy at home so I was knee-deep in motherhood, but I was ready. I was excited to finally be seeing patients with the allergic and immunological disorders that I had been so interested in during medical school.

These diseases, including chronic sinusitis, seasonal allergies, and immune deficiencies, were all challenging and interesting, but what drew me in the most was food allergy. There was something so cruel and senseless about a disease that denies a child a bakery cookie – it made me want to break its code.

Patient Emotions
As fellows, we were taught to take a detailed history of the allergic reaction from the patient and the parent, paying exquisite attention to what food was ingested, the timing of the ingestion in relationship to the symptoms and what symptoms occurred.

Patient histories would often become complicated, a fusion of facts and feelings. We would then perform skin-prick testing with the suspected food protein and draw blood for the same allergen. Combining the history and the results of the testing, a diagnosis was made.

We would review an allergen avoidance sheet with the family, explaining the importance of reading food labels, and discuss an emergency health-care plan, teaching the families how to recognize and treat an allergic reaction. We provided them with a short list of support services and asked them to follow up in one year. It was a good system, at least as far as I knew.

By the end of my first year of fellowship, we had twin boys (yes, we had three boys in 13 months!) and one of them, Gino, literally had hives on his skin only a few days after he was born. He would soon be covered in itchy, bleeding eczema and more often than not, vomit, so I made an appointment with an allergist.

Next page: The diagnosis: a powerful blow

Something was causing him to experience unnerving allergic reactions, sometimes in the middle of the night. His skin felt “on fire” with welts that would swell and itch – but what was behind the outbreaks? And how to stop them?

After consulting a physician and keeping a log of every morsel he ate for months, Grisham uncovered the bizarre cause of his misery: red meat (beef, pork and other mammals’ meat). What he didn’t know at the time was that the allergy is linked to tick bites. And Virginia, where Grisham’s family lives on a farm, is tick central.

In fact, University of Virginia researchers were among the first to document the tick-meat allergy connection, in part because renowned UVA allergist Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills himself developed meat allergy after being bitten by ticks.

What makes the allergy particularly confounding to track is that it causes delayed reactions, often over four hours after eating meat.

Despite his busy schedule of writing, speaking, and supporting good causes, Grisham manages to keep his allergy in check both at home (in Virginia and Mississippi) and on the road.

He has three new books being released in 2012, including a baseball novel, Calico Joe, and the third installment in his young adult series, featuring “kid lawyer” Theodore Boone (who happens to have asthma), but the author still found time to sit down in his Charlottesville, Virginia office with Allergic Living contributor Mary Esselman.

With good humor and frequent reference to his meticulous log notes, Grisham discussed his bedeviling allergy.

On the beginning of his odd allergy.

“The first [reaction] was in June of 2002. I noticed some rashes on my ankles. I remember thinking, ‘This is weird, both ankles.’” [He didn’t think it was a big deal.]

“Then in July 2002, I went with my wife to an annual garden club dinner, and she had prepared these huge beef tenderloins that I had grilled. And while I was cooking, I was shaving some off to sample. By the time we got to the garden club party, my ears were really, really itching. I got my wife and said, ‘Renee, something’s going on.’

There was a doctor there, and he gave me an antihistamine. My skin was on fire.

So we got in the car, and I was so desperate I stripped down, took off all my clothes but my boxer shorts, and I had all the air [conditioning vents] blowing on me, and you could just see the welts. The skin was just welting up. It almost made me nauseated just watching my skin.”

[He wrote down in the food log his doctor advised him to keep that it was beef. The penny began to drop.] “It was always beef.”

Next Page: ‘I woke up and thought I was going to die’

NHL & NBA owner Ted Leonsis

From hanging out with movie stars to schmoozing with international royalty, Ted Leonsis enjoys a pretty glamorous lifestyle. Still, days spent on planes, film sets, galas and sports arenas present a special challenge for the Internet executive turned sport-team owner and filmmaker. That’s because Leonsis lives with life-threatening allergies to peanuts and tree nuts, not to mention environmental allergies and asthma.

Leonsis, who’s best known for owning the NHL’s Washington Capitals and the NBA’s Washington Wizards, spoke to Allergic Living’s managing editor Kim Shiffman and revealed a lot about balancing an on-the-go lifestyle with his severe allergies.

Exactly what are you allergic to?

I’m allergic to every nut imaginable, plus cats and dogs, dust, mold, all the pollens, trees and grass. I’ve got a litany.

When were you diagnosed?

When I was a baby, my mom knew something was wrong with me because of how I would react to some foods. It was hit or miss, and she just thought, “Boy, guess he didn’t like that.”

Then one day I went shopping with her at Christmas, and they were roasting nuts in the store. The steam was going up in the air, and as we were walking down the aisle, I went into anaphylactic shock. An ambulance came and they took me to hospital. My mother didn’t know what had happened, but the doctor asked a lot of questions, sent me for skin tests and that’s when they realized how much allergy I had.

What’s the worst allergic reaction you’ve had?

One I remember that was really, really bad happened when I was 9 or 10. I went to a sleepover at a friend’s summerhouse, and he had cats. It activated a really bad asthma attack; I couldn’t breathe and got a bad headache. They took me to the hospital.

But more recently, in 2006, I was producing a movie – Woody Harrelson was in it and a bunch of other movie stars. We were on a studio lot in L.A. and it was late at night, maybe 10:30 p.m. Because it had been such a successful shoot, the crew ordered chicken-salad sandwiches from some famous L.A. restaurant. This is what they always did to celebrate.

The sandwiches came, and I took one. After a couple of bites, I noticed something crunchy. It was cashews. Immediately I started to get hives on my hands, then my ears, then my tongue. And I thought, “Here it comes.”

Next page: “They’re going to find me dead in this bathroom!”