I jerk my head to her. “No!” I say, but my face flushes at the automatic thought of Eric in my room. My bed. I try to compose myself. “I mean, yes, they sat on my furniture, of course. No to spending the night.”
She nods. “Just trying to understand if and how any indirect contact might have occurred. People slough skin cells all the time, and though it hasn’t been a problem for you in your past—your allergy has always been caused by direct skin-to-skin touch—my thinking is that your years of reclusiveness have caused your body to become even more sensitive, and maybe even sloughed skin cells are a problem for you now. Think—is there anything that could be coming in contact with your torso like that? You’re not sleeping on sheets that someone else has slept on. Are you borrowing clothes or anything?”
At that question, my heart jumps. Eric’s sweatshirt.
“I have been wearing a shirt,” I say. “Um . . . that doesn’t belong to me.”
“Hmm.” She taps her lips with her pen. “That could be it. Especially if the person wore it before giving it to you.”
I think of the way it smells—not like laundry detergent, but woodsy, like him, and when she says it, I’m sure that’s exactly right.
“When did you wear it last?”
“Um . . . last night.”
“But the rash started before that, correct?” She glances back at her notes. “A week ago?”
A flush creeps up my neck. “I, uh . . . have kind of been wearing it every night. But I’ve never reacted to that before—other people’s clothes or sheets or anything,” I say, thinking of my childhood romps in mom’s warm bed and playing dress-up in her closet.
Dr. Zhang nods. “Allergies can be strange like that. I once had a patient that had been eating shrimp for his entire life and then suddenly, at the age of twenty-six, nearly died at a seafood buffet. It’s a mystery. That’s extreme, but you see what I mean. Allergies—and their triggers—can change without rhyme or reason.” She puts her notepad on the counter. “So, how about this—you don’t borrow clothes anymore unless they’re clean,” she says, turning on the sink. “And maybe think about washing that sweatshirt?”
I do. Think about it. And I’m surprised to find the thought kind of devastates me.
Dr. Zhang scrubs her hands under the stream of water and snaps rubber gloves onto her hands. “Now, let’s do a thorough examination, get you a prescription-strength hydrocortisone along with the EpiPens, and go from there. Shall we?”
After the exam, I get dressed and go sit in Dr. Zhang’s office, waiting for her. I try to remember the visit twelve years ago, my mom sitting in the molded-plastic seat beside me. I’m sure she was wearing something low-cut, revealing, but I can’t picture the exact outfit. And then, more alarmingly, I realize I can’t picture her. I can hear her voice, plain as day, but her face is kind of blurred.
Dr. Zhang comes in and sits at the desk across from me. “So,” she says. “Jubilee. I don’t want to cause unneeded anxiety, but it really does concern me if your skin is reacting to indirect contact now.”
I look at her.
“From wearing another person’s sweatshirt,” she clarifies. “You need to be extraordinarily careful until we can sort this out,” she says. “That means absolutely no touching at all. I know you know that, but I can’t stress it enough. We have no idea how your body will react.”
“OK,” I say, but all I really am hearing is “until we can sort this out,” and I know this is the part where she’s going to ask to study me. To make me one of her research projects. And this is also the part where I walk out. Again.
“So, I don’t know if you’ve read any of my research—”
I shake my head no. Here we go.
“I’ve been running some clinical trials the past five years on a Chinese herbal treatment to cure severe food allergies. We’ve had about a sixty percent success rate.”
I know I should be impressed by this. Allergies are a confounding ailment in the medical community. They don’t make sense evolutionarily speaking, especially mine. Why would my body fight the very thing that is its only chance of procreating? And no one knows the root cause of them—is it environment? Genetics? When the origins of a problem aren’t clear, it’s near impossible to find a solution. But I leave my face blank, unsure of where she’s going with this.
She continues. “I don’t think you’d be a good candidate. At least not yet. Your allergy being so . . . rare. I have no idea if it would respond in the same way as food allergies.”
I nod, waiting.
“But have you heard of immunotherapy?”
I shake my head.
She clasps her hands in front of her. “It’s a common treatment for allergies like rhinitis or bee pollen. Patients are injected with small amounts of the substance they’re allergic to, in theory building up a tolerance over time, in order to reduce the immune system response to the allergen. It often leads to relief of the allergy symptoms long after the treatment is stopped.”
“Like a cure?” I ask.
She pauses. “I hesitate to call it that,” she says, hedging. “It’s more of a management system—a way to keep the allergy under control, desensitize someone enough that they can tolerate whatever they’re allergic to.” She looks to make sure I’m clear on the difference. I nod. “Now they’re doing it for food allergies—things like peanut butter and eggs. It’s an oral therapy, where they give the patient a small amount of peanut butter or whatever they’re allergic to daily, building up their tolerance over time. Early studies have shown some promise.”
“OK. What does that have to do with me?”
“Well, Dr. Benefield believed—and I agree with him—that you have some sort of genetic mutation”—at the word “mutation,” I’m surprised to find I don’t cringe, like I used to; I think of Aja, and my lips turn up—“causing you to be absent one of the millions of proteins all humans have, which is the one you’re likely allergic to.”
“Right—but you said there was no way to tell which one it was.”
“Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Genetic sequencing could tell us, but twelve years ago it would have cost millions of dollars and taken several years, if not decades, to try and sequester a single protein.”
My heart starts thumping against my rib cage. “And now?”
“It’s cheaper. A little faster.”
“How much faster?”
“I think we could find it in a year. Or less.”
“And when you find it—”
“We’d isolate the protein. Make a solution containing very minute amounts of it, and give it to you every day, in the hopes that you build up a tolerance. That your body stops fighting it.”
I sit back in the chair, my heart thundering in my ears. A cure. OK, a “management system.” But still. I shake my head a little, not fully believing it. “What’s the catch?”
She sticks her pen behind her ear like my mom used to do with a single cigarette. “No catch. But you need to be aware it may not work. And it is still expensive. You’d have to agree to be part of my ongoing research. I’d need to clear it with the department, write a paper on it for a journal. Unless you’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars lying around.”