A Spanking That Wasn't...

But maybe would have been in different circumstances?

The situation was something like this: I have developed an allergy to strawberries over the past couple of years, and unfortunately it's a respiratory allergy, i.e. if I eat (or sometimes even smell) strawberries, I have an asthma attack. Which is a pain, because I like strawberries. Also, because it's a fairly new thing, I sometimes forget, or fail to realise that I'm eating something with strawberries in it. (This story makes me sound quite stupid, which is fair in this case.)

So, I was away for the weekend with various vanilla friends, and I was the first one up in the morning. I went to the kitchen, heated up a croissant and proceeded to put strawberry jam on it. I hadn't quite put two and two together and realised that strawberry jam may well contain strawberries... (I know, I know...) As I was having a nice little wheezy/coughy fit, one of my friends came into the kitchen. He's about 10 years older than me, has quite a, well, dominant personality, and as far as I know is completely vanilla. He is also a well qualified first aider with quite a lot of experience of food allergies. He asked what was wrong, and once I'd taken my inhaler and was OK again, I explained. He berated me a little bit for being so idiotic, and breakfast carried on.



Which should have been the end of the story, right?

Um, wrong...



Later that day we were all out having a pub lunch, and dessert appeared on the table. Each dessert was garnished with a strawberry. Now I have this thing where I worry that I've just somehow convinced myself that I'm allergic when I'm not really. So I sometimes eat a strawberry just to see what happens. (Given that the smell can bring on an attack, I don't know why I have doubts, but hey.)

Unsurprisingly, the inevitable happened. I started wheezing and had to grab my inhaler to relieve myself. At which point the friend looked over and asked what was wrong.

The person sitting next to me said, rolling their eyes, "She was just checking she's still allergic to strawberries..."

"She WHAT?!" exclaimed first aider friend.

I was then treated to a long lecture about the seriousness of respiratory allergies, about how they did not always escalate gradually, how you could have a mild reaction one time and a very serious reaction the next, etc. etc, about how damn stupid it was to "test to see if I was still allergic" when I know perfectly well that I am, blah blah blah.

In all fairness, it was a good lecture, and it did give me pause for thought: I am more careful now, and try and think before acting. But I do wonder quite what would have transpired in similar circumstances but with different friends, or if the friend lecturing were a spanker.

I can quite picture the scene, once we got back to the holiday cottages, being led into one of the bedrooms for a rather more "impactful" lesson on the stupidity of knowingly endangering ones health.

Have you ever had one of those moments when you think... "if the dynamic here was just a little bit different, I wonder exactly what would be happening right now...?"