Behold your immune system: the grounds of an eternal battle. Divided very simply into two sides: your body and the enemy. The enemy is the unhealthy––viruses, infections, junk food, and countless others. Cunning. Despicable. Forever fighting to vanquish your body. Just one mistake can tip the battle in its favor. Therefore, you must exercise discipline with what you eat, lest you jeopardize the lives of the troops fighting to protect your body.

My mom has explained this analogy, although a simpler version, to me dozens of times, and it has always made sense to me. This must be how everybody else’s immune systems work, I would think, and since they all fight for eternity, I must do the same. I must fight; I must persist; I must be fearless. Yet, as my six-year-old self lies in my hospital bed with my mom sitting beside me, futilely squeezing the warmth of her pure blood into my numb fingers, I can’t help but feel a little bit scared. No matter how I try, I can’t find a place in this story for the dairy enemy that curdles my blood as it swells through my body, boiling my skin to craggy gravel. Why do I have to fight this unique enemy that nobody else I know has to fight? Why am I alone? Maybe my mom knows. She always knows.

Shifting my head slightly in her direction, my gaze latches onto hers through the sliver between my swollen eyelids. Her eyes twinkle, their usually impervious armor betrayed by each teary blink. My tongue trudges out of my mouth like a floppy, soggy towel. It faintly moistens my bloated lips before arduously hoisting itself back into my mouth. The words sloppily stumble off my swollen tongue when I murmur to her, “Why can other people eat dairy and I can’t?”

In reply, she strokes my limp fingers. Does she not know? Why won’t she answer? She’s my mom, she has to know. If I wasn’t numb, I would feel in her caresses the tense, hopeless, onerous pain only a mother could feel for their child. She says gently, “Taotao, I don’t know. Nobody knows––even doctors and scientists don’t know.”

No, no, no no no no no somebody has to know; I can’t be alone, I just can’t. You…you have to understand how I feel, how my allergies invade both my body and mind like a parasite, how they mangle both from the inside. They have to fit into that story my mom told me somehow; you have to understand my battle, the slaughter that I can only lie here and watch, petrified and defenseless. Comrade, prepare yourself for battle, but not to fight. No––prepare to be the victim of allergy warfare, conducted on the battlefield of your immune system.

Behold another day of your eternal immunological war. As the general, you are the brain controlling the body’s daily assault on the indefatigable enemy. You detail your attack plans from your dirt chamber, behind the trench’s front line to several messengers who then convey them to your lieutenants, the main leaders of the troops of your body. All these men obey readily, for they are entirely willing to consign their lives to your judgment. Without wavering, your mind and body have always worked in harmony. Beyond the front line, your body’s soldiers fire again and again at the enemy, killing virus after virus after infection after infection, even as more arrive with more ammunition as quickly as their allies fall. 

Then, at lunch on your third day of first grade, you stab a meatball on your plate with a metal fork, just like everybody else. You hoist it up as if it is a trophy. You take two simple yet glorious bites. You crush the succulent ground meat against the roof of your mouth with your tongue, relishing the juice trickling into your throat. Then, you swallow.

You first notice that the ground and air, which usually quake with the thundering of stampeding boots, rifle fire, and cannon blasts, now lie still. After you ate that meatball, it was as if your body stopped communicating with your brain. Silence, so dissonant to the usual booming of a battlefield, gnaws at you. Suddenly, the roar of gunfire shatters the silence, like the smashing of pots and pans together condensed into a needle thrust into your eardrums. The gunshots knit a quilt of piercing pain to suffocate your brain, scrambling your already frenzied thoughts. What was that pause? What happened to my troops? Where are my messengers? The meatball! It must have been! Standing up so quickly that you overturn your chair, you rush to the chamber door and peer outside. 

Comrade, you didn’t know the meatball was made with cheese, did you? Before you even know that the dairy enemy has attacked, the ambulance is already parked outside your elementary school cafeteria. As you realize you are asphyxiating on those two tiny bites of meatball, the EMTs have already placed you on a gurney and are rushing you to that ambulance. Helpless you lie, suffocating, whimpering. But you must open your eyes, comrade, and bear witness to the slaughter.

Your body’s troops line the entirety of the trench, like a haphazardly built tile floor waxed with a new bloody veneer. As you traverse the trench, you find several wrist-sized canisters lying on the ground. Picking one up, you can still feel the tickle of some sort of invisible, odorless gas leaking from the metal lip of the canister. You’ve never seen this chemical weapon before. And yet, you know that it must have been what ravaged your troops. As you pick up more of these canisters, their weight, not in physical pounds but in memoriam of all the death they have caused, forces you to your knees. Blind and deaf to the world around, you drop to the ground; it almost swallows you, its bowels digesting you in the stench of dirty, bloody death.

Comrade, do you see the brutality of allergy warfare? Your body hurts itself, over and over again, just as these soldiers slaughter each other, for it thinks it fights an external threat. But comrade, how can a few tiny canisters turn an entire army against itself? How can two bites of a meatball, or even a few drops of milk, one nibble of ice cream, one sliver of string cheese manipulate your body into believing it is somehow fighting a threat as dangerous as…as…as the bubonic plague? Either your troops are so stupid they cannot follow your brain’s directions, or your brain is incompetent, unable to correctly guide the troops. This is allergy warfare, comrade: as your body self-destructs with the introduction of whatever dairy-containing food you desire, you command no army in the war. You are instead a spectator of the slaughter, subjugated by the weight of its causes and submerged under the weight of your sacrificed troops.

“Halt, soldier!” You snap out of your thoughts and spin around to the source of the command, a few of the empty canisters spilling out of your arms. You see five soldiers: one scrutinizes you with one scorched eye, likely from a missed point-blank shot, and one twitching eye; another man uses his thumbs to plug shredded holes on each side of his jaw, likely the aftermath of a stray bullet, such that his other fingers flop in front of his face like a monkey mocking its spectators; leaning on this mutilated monkey’s shoulder convulses a one-legged creature, barely still a man, a pistol in one hand and an endless stream of bloody snot dripping out of both his nostrils; a final man armed with a rifle stands behind him with a stump for his left ear and a cherry tomato-sized hole where his right ear should be. All these men, victims of the empty canisters littered around you.

Comrade, now do you understand the consequences of allergy warfare? It robs your body not only of its proper defenses but also of all its senses: the skin under your eyes puffs up until you can barely see; your entire body from tongue to toes grows numb; your lips puff up; snot clogs your nose; the insides of your cheeks swell until they almost trap your tongue; your ears are cursed by a continuous, faint ringing, overlaid with your body’s other sounds of suffering.

Suddenly, the one-legged man raises his pistol and fires at the man with the scorched eye, but the bullet flies wide with his convulsing hand. Before you can yell out, “Get away! The gas still has him!”, the earless man blows a hole in the one-legged man’s head. The man with the holes in his jaw stumbles away, and he lurches forward as if to scream, but all that comes out is a squeaky, suppressed drone.

After a few seconds, all the soldiers turn to you. You can see their eyes flicker from you to the canisters––once containing the gas that turned them against each other––that now lie around your feet and in your arms. Then, the earless man steps forward and jams the rifle against your forehead. He splutters at you, “A few minutes ago, that man on the floor behind me was fighting right beside me, with me. Sir,” he spat the word out, “why didn’t you see this coming?” He kicked the canisters on the ground. “Why didn’t you lead us through this? You’re supposed to be our leader, and you abandoned us. That man on the floor,” he jabbed at the body behind him, “is dead because of you. We all are.” What can you say back? That before you even knew what the threat was, the ambulance was already parked outside your elementary school cafeteria? That when you realized you were asphyxiating on those two tiny bites of meatball, the emergency personnel  were already rushing you to the ambulance? And even if you had any answers, he wouldn’t be able to hear them. Just as you lied on that gurney, suffocating, whimpering, and helpless, you now kneel in front of your men, silent, petrified, helpless.

As if expecting no reply, the earless man reloads the rifle. Then, by some cruel miracle, his twitching eye stabilizes for a brief second and shoots a bullet of hatred into your eyes, near-blinded with tears from the sight of your men crippled by the harm you had no way of preventing. He looks back at the men behind him. They all nod. He turns back, and you see his finger tighten on the trigger. The man with his thumbs plugging his jaw wounds grumbles, “Sowwy, genewuhl. Buthd we godduh make shur you can’d hurdus.” And as you await that final bullet, propelled by distrust between body and brain regarding the actual threat the allergies pose to the body, you close your eyes, tumble to the ground, and scrunch your body up into a ball.  

Comrade, do you feel it now? Allergies reduce even the bravest, smartest general into the likes of a newborn baby so overwhelmed by its new world that its throat seizes with a useless, hopeless cry trapped in its five-second old, one-centimeter-thick vocal cords. Feel helpless as you roll in your crib of death-drenched dirt, comrade, for your brain is not a general in the face of allergy warfare, but merely a collapsed, mushy mound stinking of self-pity and self-hatred and futile bargaining. And as wrong as it is to shoot one’s general who has led his soldiers through to so many tomorrows, as wrong as it is to shoot a newborn baby twisting and turning helplessly in its crib of death-drenched dirt on the battlefield, allergy warfare is even more wrong, and sometimes the only solution is to repeatedly shoot your brain with bullets of pain and misery molded in your body’s immunological slaughter, for allergy warfare makes you forever hate yourself for who you are, for who you have been since birth––

Six-year-old me, I need you to stop. You’re scared. Of your allergies. Of this slaughter you created in your head. Of how your allergies define your identity. Trust me, I am one of few you know who understands. After all, I am you, but with many more years of life, and you––well, you are me, with so many more years of life to come. So, c’mon, with me, together: breathe in––breathe out. Breathe in––breathe out. Nice, man.

Look, Mom came up with that war analogy in the first place to help us see that we have a fighting chance, that we can and should make a difference in our bodies by being careful with what we eat. Then, since we needed a way to cope with our inherent, seemingly invincible allergies, we augmented that war analogy until it almost seemed real, until the slaughter terrorizing our heads was worse than the allergies plaguing our bodies. Well, I’m here to help you change our strategy. Remember, we have a fighting chance in this battle.

First, we’ll ask for help when we need it. For example, when we don’t feel good, we have to tell an adult how we feel and ask them for help. Now, I know adults are not always the most understanding, but they really can help. Especially Mom and Dad. Think about it, who else could have been brave enough to be there for us after we ate that meatball? Who else could have sat there for hours next to us while we slept in that hospital bed, not knowing how we would be when we woke up?

Second, we gotta be disciplined with what we eat. Remember what Mom said about discipline? I mean, if I remember at age sixteen, then you have gotta remember at age six, right? Yeah, yeah, that’s what I thought, my man.

Third, we won’t let our allergies prevent us from connecting with other people. Just because our friends are eating pizza and ice cream at school, that doesn’t mean we’ll walk away and sit by ourselves. After all, our friends aren’t our friends because we eat pizza like them, right? And we know ourselves well enough to know what kind of people to be around.

In addition, we must work on building immunity to our allergies. Now and then, allergy warfare is going to be used, and we’re gonna be poisoned again––Hey, it’s okay, I know it’s scary, but as we experience it more, we’re gonna know better just how much control our allergies have over us, right? So how about we take control over this battle and fight it on our own terms, little by little, day by day, until we can eat dairy foods as if they’re any old regular piece of food? Heck yeah, man, that’s it! We can definitely take some control. At the end of the day, it’s our bodies, our brains, our lives.

We have to stay strong, man. I know you know that the fight with dairy is not only in our bodies. It’s in our minds too. That general––our brain––all he suffered was because of the fear and pity and hatred we let consume us. No more. You and me, together: survivors of allergy warfare.

Finally, as survivors, we must prohibit allergy warfare. I get it, it feels so wrong to forget It’s that simple, man. Forget all those fancy-shmancy metaphors, vocab, similes, imagery, alliteration. As much as I love that stuff and as much as I know you love that stuff too, they don’t define our allergies. They are not who we are. We don’t have to be afraid anymore.