I began to notice it when I would walk home from school. It was springtime and afternoons would always get a light afternoon shower and leave sidewalks with puddles of rainwater. I would walk the 13 minutes from North Middle School to my house and it was largely uneventful until I started to notice I’d come home with hives up and down my legs. They were little red bumps starting from my sock line and creeping their way up my leg. Itchy, uncomfortable, and rash-like. It wasn’t just one time, but it started to become every time.
Curious, I tried to investigate what could be causing this outbreak on my walks home. I would study the ground and every step I took, thinking maybe I’d see some chemical or some clue to indicate why my legs were breaking out in hives. I saw the still puddles of water with fallen leaves floating at the top and little speckles of yellow dust accumulating on the surface. Pollen! Of course, I’m just maybe allergic to the pollen. I told my mom and she said, “Next time, just take some Zyrtec before walking home.” I popped the pills and walked home, thinking “Solved.” But the hives appeared yet again and my mom and I, confused, just shrugged it off.
Then I was brushing my teeth and my feet started to itch. And it’d started off as an itch that you unconsciously start scratching. I’d rub my feet over one another and when I looked down, my foot was red and swollen. I had a welt growing on my foot. What in the world?
Summer came along and my next-door neighbor invited me to her backyard for a slip and slide pool party. It was a typical summer pool party with little middle school kids eating watermelon, running through the slip and slide, and parents mingling about drinking beer. I took a couple of turns sliding down the plastic sheet, but something was weird. I wasn’t feeling too great. I started to get lightheaded. I sat down and drank some water, maybe I just needed a break. A few minutes passed and my stomach felt weird, I thought “maybe I’m gonna throw up.” I headed to the bathroom and sat on the floor, my head hovering over the toilet. Nothing was really coming up though and my eyes felt heavy. Black spots started clouding my vision and I felt my head slump against the wall. I was blacking out. I sat for a few minutes, aware I was close to blacking out and trying to stay conscious. I told myself to get up and go home. If I could just walk the couple of feet home, then I could pass out. So, I did. I walked the couple of yards home and collapsed on the couch. My mom came and gave me Benadryl that knocked me out. Later when I woke up, we brainstormed what it was. Food sickness? Pollen? Pollen didn’t seem like a likely answer anymore.
We scheduled an appointment with an allergist and they pricked my entire back with the whole range of tests. Nothing came of it. I was mildly allergic to a specific tree pollen, but the allergist said nothing that would cause anything extreme. We left the office confused.
My mom’s ex-husband was a big ski fanatic. He went up almost every weekend and this weekend he decided to take my sister and I. We had never gone to the mountains before to do any kind of snow sports. My mom pulled out the snowsuits that were years old and my sister and I suited up until we looked like giant blue marshmallows.
The day of, I took off on the mountains and immediately got the hang of sliding down the hill. My sister though practically had to be carried down the hill. At the end of the day, we met up at the ski lobby and shed off the marshmallow suits to collapse into the car. I took off my mask in the lobby and immediately my sister stared at my face. “Laura, your face is so swollen and red.” She put a hand to my face and said how hot it was. I looked into a mirror and saw that my skin was as bright as a tomato except for a ring outlining my ski mask. I wasn’t sick though, I didn’t have a fever or felt ill, I just looked… red and swollen and I could feel the heat radiating from my face.
That was it, my mom was done writing all these off as weird occurrences. Something was causing this. Little things had begun to set my skin off. The walks home, brushing my teeth, throwing a basketball outside, our horseback riding lessons, swimming, eating ice cream, snowboarding.
It was winter at this point and I was coming home almost every day with hives all over my body. My body felt like it was on fire and I cried trying not to touch the outbreak of hives that always turned into burning welts the size of baseballs. My mom started investigating online, looking at Web MD and writing odd Google searches to see if anything matched what was happening to me.
The last straw was at the YMCA. I went swimming with my friends at the downtown YMCA. We started off in the kiddie pool. It was loud, overcrowded with rowdy kids, and filled with suspiciously warm slightly yellow-ish water. As 12 year old’s, my friends and I were the oldest ones in the kiddie pool so we moved to the big pool and mostly just clung to the sidelines in the water chatting about middle school gossip. They swam out to the middle and called out to me to join them, but I wasn’t feeling so well. I crawled out and sat on the edge of the pool. “You go ahead, I’m gonna sit here for a moment.” I felt similar to the time I was in the slip ‘n slide. So I took some deep breaths and said, “Just sit here for a minute, pace yourself, get back in and you’ll be fine.” I got back in the pool after sitting on the sidelines and cracked a smile to my friends to assure them I was fine. But I still just stayed by the wall, I felt too weak to swim out.
My friend loudly exclaimed, “Laura! Your back!”
“What?” I couldn’t see my back.
“It’s all red and covered in bumps.” Oh no. Hives.
“Do you feel alright.”
“Yeah I feel fine. I think I just need to sit.” I got back out of the pool and sat back on the sidelines. My friends were worried now though. They looked at me with concerned eyes and said, “Laura, you don’t look so good…” I could tell I was getting very lightheaded. My friends got out of the water. “What do you need?” There was urgency in their voices now.
“I think… I think I need to go to the locker room.” They helped carry me to the changing room.
“Here wait.” I turned on the shower on hot water and stood there, closing my eyes and breathing deeply. I don’t know why, but the hot water felt like the right thing to do at that point. Don’t black out.
My friends ran to find a lifeguard and I was alone in the locker room.
I couldn’t stand anymore so I sat down. I sat there on the floor with steaming water pouring down on my face. I don’t know how long they were gone but soon I was laying on the ground and my eyes were closed, and I heard the lifeguard above me say “I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t help.”
My friends, my poor 12-year-old friends, were freaking out. They went and got my phone, called my mom, and it felt like only a minute or two, but I know it had to be at least fifteen minutes and my mom was lifting me off the ground and drying me off with a towel.
I don’t know what really happened after that. I passed out and woke up on my couch 6 hours later. My mom recapped the events. She shook her heads recalling the lifeguard who just shrugged their shoulders and didn’t call for any medical help. She praised my friends for knowing to call her and for noticing something was wrong. She also said with a bit of an excited smile, “I think I know what it is.”
She had been scouring the web for weird diseases, skin conditions, and symptoms and came across this thing called Cold Urticaria.
She went to the freezer, got an ice cube, wrapped it in a dish towel, and set it on my forearm. One minute later, she took off the towel and lo and behold, a massive red swollen welt was in its place. Five minutes later, the welt had doubled. That was the confirmation my mom was looking for.
She scheduled me for an appointment with the allergist. We showed him pictures of our home ice cube test, explained all the occurrences including the most extreme incident at the YMCA. He got an ice cube, put it in a plastic medicine cup, and told me to hold it on my arm. The same welt appeared, and he confirmed that I had Cold Urticaria.
Cold Urticaria is an allergy to the cold. Cold meaning snow, water ice, wind. It’s a rare disorder where welts and hives start forming on the skin after exposure to cold things. It can either be acquired, the reasons for which are unknown, or it can be genetically inherited. Sometimes it just disappears for people. Sometimes young kids grow out of it. But likely if it’s genetic, it’s for life. While hives, swelling, and numbness are pretty common symptoms, the extreme is anaphylaxis. Like with a peanut allergy, it’s the whole-body reacting, difficulty breathing, and passing out.
It explained everything. I started breaking out on my legs because the rainwater on the ground was splashing on my skin. I got welts on my feet when I brushed my teeth because the drops of water from my mouth would drip on my toes. Snowboarding, obvious. Swimming reactions were because the water was too cold. Ice cream made my lips swell. Cold water at restaurants made me mouth numb.
There’s no cure. No allergy shot of cold air that I can just shoot into my system to make my body get used to cold stimuli. My doctor said I had to carry an EpiPen around with me everywhere. To avoid all cold stimuli, particularly swimming in water because if I pass out in water, I could drown.
When I was at the allergist and did the ice cube test, my doctor went out to the hallway and started telling all the other doctors and nurses. They began to file into my room one-by-one, taking pictures on their phones of my reaction. Many of them exclaiming, “I’ve only ever seen this in textbooks. This is amazing!” I felt special but I also felt a bit sad.
Cold urticaria changed a lot of my teen years. I had to quit horseback riding lessons because I couldn’t be outside if it got below 50 degrees. I had to be careful in the summer months in case restaurants or businesses blasted their A/C. When I went to the gym, I had to avoid the machines by the fans because the cold air from the fans would make my sweat cold and my face and body would start breaking out in itchy hives. My middle school graduation celebration was a retreat to the mountains, and I couldn’t go. I haven’t swum in more than a decade. In Colorado for 7 out of 12 months, I couldn’t really go outside or if I did, it came with the inevitable breakout of hives and swelling.
When it came time for college, I saw it as my chance out of Colorado and go to a place where I could be outside all the time. I applied and got into a school in San Diego. But my dad convinced me to stay in Colorado until I finished college to save money.
Skip to 2019, I had been out of school for a while now and this past winter was brutal. Multiple blizzards came with my mom calling me, pleading me to call in sick to work because to get stuck outside in the snow is more fatal to me than for other people. I spent too many days just starting out of the window, looking at the piles of snow, and feeling like the kid in detention who can’t go out for recess. And so, I made a decision to move from Colorado before the fall time hit.
And that’s how I ended up here, in Austin Texas- where it’s warmer than necessary but where I can be outside for most of the year. I cried a lot the weeks leading up to when I was leaving Colorado. Colorado is beautiful. It’s where my mom is who I love. It’s amazing in the summers and I feel most at peace when I’m hiking high up in the mountains with the sun on my face.
I was sad to leave the state that is my home and that I really wish I could live at forever. But I was also crying because I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to live somewhere where I could maybe almost forget that I have Cold Urticaria. I was crying because to live my life normally and be outside for almost all of the year was becoming a reality.
My first week here, I spent a lot of nights biking around downtown and just looking at the skyline with the buildings all lit up at night. I would ride past just thinking how grateful I am to be in a place where I can be outside at night and ride around and just feel free.
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