A teenager from Havant, Hampshire, has to manage more than 40 allergies—including an allergy to water—using a colour-coded spreadsheet.
Chloe Ramsay, 19, was diagnosed with pollen food syndrome in June 2023, which explains many of her allergies to fruits, perfumes, and even sweets.
Her most unusual condition, aquagenic urticaria, causes painful rashes when water touches her skin. The reaction was so severe that rain once left her "wanting to scrape [her] skin off with a knife."
While medication has reduced her symptoms, she still tracks her allergies, which change frequently, using a traffic-light system.
Chloe, who had life-threatening reactions as a child, now receives bi-monthly injections and may need lifelong treatment. "I'm so unlucky—I just have to laugh it off now," she said.
Chloe Ramsay, 19, was diagnosed with pollen food syndrome in June 2023, which explains many of her allergies to fruits, perfumes, and even sweets.
Her most unusual condition, aquagenic urticaria, causes painful rashes when water touches her skin. The reaction was so severe that rain once left her "wanting to scrape [her] skin off with a knife."
While medication has reduced her symptoms, she still tracks her allergies, which change frequently, using a traffic-light system.
Chloe, who had life-threatening reactions as a child, now receives bi-monthly injections and may need lifelong treatment. "I'm so unlucky—I just have to laugh it off now," she said.
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FunTranscript
00:00Hi I'm Chloe, I'm allergic to over 40 different kind of foods and substances.
00:08My rarest one is I'm allergic to water. Well I can drink water but
00:15it's when it touches my body so if I wash my hands or if I go for a shower or if it rains
00:23unless I'm covered in some sort of thing that is able to barrier it
00:30I will get an allergic reaction. It's like a tachycardia so it's a load of rashes on my skin
00:36and it feels like ants are crawling inside. I first discovered my first allergic reaction when
00:42I was six months old so my mum fed me potato and I completely collapsed in the high chair
00:48and went blue and then I got into Southampton Hospital and I've just been with them and then
00:56on and off pretty much since. I was in there every year every half year ish up until I was about 12
01:05I think and then I was finished with that and then I came back with the water allergy. Things like
01:10fruit that I'm allergic to there's a lot of it found in desserts so sometimes you can get an
01:17ordinary chocolate cake but then they would add strawberries or raspberries on top. Things like
01:22water with the rain happening it's I get a bit scared going outside. How do you keep
01:27track of all the allergens? I have a spreadsheet on Google Sheets to keep track of like sectioned
01:34it into different colours and different sections like food, environmental, animals and so forth
01:40and I wrote down like what I'm allergic to in these sections. My biggest one is food so I have
01:46I think about 43 at the moment that are food so and then the rest are different things.
01:55I started my first dose of it's called Zola it's like an injection it was an injection for asthma
02:03but they then found it actually can help with allergic reactions so they give two to me
02:11every four weeks for six months and then I'm now self-injecting myself as of January.
02:18Well hopefully these injections sort of help everything and that this is my last course
02:25but if not then I might potentially be on these injections for life which is a bit
02:31inconvenient but at least I don't have to go to a hospital now I can do it from home
02:35and I guess allergies are just going to be an aspect of my life forever since birth.