I am sitting at an upended barrel in a dark bar in the East Village. Every part of me is touching someone else; we are wedged atop our bar stools and servers jostle us as they ease their way through the crowd, holding plates of food above their heads. Aloft in their hands, the wedges of omelet and the dull eyes of grilled sardines nearly touch the fishing nets that droop from the ceiling.

On our barrel is an open bottle of red wine, several empty beer bottles and the remains of our last round of food: empty cockle shells; octopus tentacles sliced into thick white sections, smeared with paprika and stabbed with toothpicks; the feathery spines of small fish whose cheeks have been hollowed out by our forks. A waiter's disembodied arm nudges a basket of bread aside and sets down a plate of grilled shrimp.

The shrimp are as long as my hand and sausage-fat inside their carapaces, scarlet antennae curled insensible on the plate. Each eye gleams like a lone pearl of caviar. We split their shells with our fingers, tongue the meat from the cavity. We break off the heads and turn them upside down like thimblefuls of soup. Their antennae brush questioningly against our palms, but, unrepentant, we curl our mouths around them and suck the insides from their little skulls. It's infinite shrimp, tasting of smoke from the grill and the coral-streaked white meat of their bodies, the oceanic sweetness of their shells curving, tough as fingernails, against our tongues.

An hour later, walking briskly up First Avenue, I feel my hair stand up on end. It rises poised and alert from the follicles, and despite the cold a sudden flush of blood heats my scalp and my face. I run my hands through my hair, scratching at my skin to get rid of the tingling. I am too warm. A throb is caught in my throat and I can't swallow it away. It feels substantial and round, nestled like an egg in my windpipe.

My husband sees me lay a hand against my throat and stops on the sidewalk. My eyelids are growing taut as blisters, my lips thickening. I stand on First Avenue, wondering if I have time to get back uptown. The last time this happened it was so slow I drove across town to the hospital I liked best. But this is moving faster. Steve hails a cab, and as we get in I say to our friends, already speaking with some difficulty, "You go on to the bar. I'm just going to the nearest emergency room."

By the end of the ten-block drive to Beth Israel my tongue has swelled until it lies across my teeth in a slab and my lips are purple and stiff. The egg in my throat is larger, and with a frill of panic around my heart I realize that until I get to a hospital my throat will just keep tightening. Once this begins, nothing in my body knows to stop. I pray there'll be no traffic jams.

In the ER they hustle me to a bed and toss a hospital gown my way, leaving Steve to fill out forms. They return a minute later with an IV and injections of epinephrine, Benadryl, and Prednizone. My eyes are closed against the light above me, so I only feel them prodding me, sticking adhesive monitors to my ribs and chest. I open my eyes when someone asks where I ate and what might have caused this. "This" is anaphylactic shock.

"Probably shellfish," I guess thickly.

"Okay, what kind?"

It seems best to catalogue everything remotely aqueous, so I say, "Shrimp, scallops, mussels, cockles, octopus, sardinesÉ"

The resident and the nurse exchange glances.

The resident looks at me over his glasses. "Never eat shellfish again," he orders.

"I don't even want to," I lie.

After a few minutes the resident says, of the tapas bar, "You know, I keep meaning to go to that place." It occurs to me that he is trying to keep me occupied and calm. In fact I am fairly relaxed now. I bristle with needles, am swathed in blankets, speckled with adhesive patches bearing jellied circles and metal buttons that send my pulse to the monitors. Things are happening. People are watching.

"Was the food good?" the resident asks.

"Worth it," I croak, and pass out.

I went into anaphylactic shock once before, in Wisconsin, but somehow it hadn't seemed to matter. We thought it was crab rangoon, which I only tasted because someone else ordered it. That time I thought my scalp itched from sweat after dancing, so I waited awhile, finished my beer and went home, where I took an Allegra and lay down.

That time I thought there was something caught in my throat, but the something turned out to be my throat. At the UW hospital I sat in a chair and handed over my insurance card and explained the problem, and then we ambled over to a bed and I took a leisurely intravenous cocktail of Benadryl and epinephrine. Every now and again someone popped in to check on me. I slipped in and out of sleep. After a few hours we went home, none the worse for wear. We had just gotten married and were about to move to New York. Other things seemed more important. What were we thinking, we chided each other, ordering shellfish in the Midwest?

After that first reaction they prescribed an Epi-Pen, which is an automatic injection of epinephrine. You drive it down hard into your thigh when you feel the first warnings, like the throat swelling or hair standing up on end, and a needle pops out and jabs through your clothes and into your muscle. It comes in its own little tube, like Pez.

A few weeks after the first attack and months before the second, I tested myself. No crab rangoon, obviously, but at the Delaware shore I whacked fresh blue crab with a mallet and picked out the white shards of meat. After the first bite, it got easier and easier. Fresh seafood seemed so healthful, not like the dicey shellfish I had grown up eating on special occasions in Ohio and later in Wisconsin. I shattered scarlet lobster claws and dug out the flesh with the prongs of my fork, wrenched several dozen clams from their shells and crushed their bellies in my teeth without a thought. I was pretty sure my Epi-Pen was somewhere in my purse.

Steve and I breathed a sigh of relief.

"Good God, can you imagine if I were allergic to shellfish?" I crowed. We were out on a porch, drinking beer and eating from a mixing bowl filled with steamed clams and wine. I held the shell down and wrenched a clam off its tight bundle of muscle, leaving a round wound like a bullet hole in its flesh.

"It wouldn't have been right," Steve agreed. He ate a slice of lobster tail. We had killed the lobster first with a headfirst dive into hot water and then cracked open the shells as we looked for roe. There wasn't any, so we flattened its head and legs and sauteed it in butter and wine. Now it was lobster in lobster stock, scarlet with tomatoes. It was delicious.

"I mean, you can't not eat shellfish," he continued, slurping some broth. "We plan vacations around it."

I have a terrible feeling we then clinked our beer bottles in a nitwitted little toast.

The morning after my most recent trip to the emergency room I wake with my skull heavy and congested.

"Am I still hideous?" I ask Steve.

He looks me over. "You look like you've been through something," he admits.

My eyelids are swollen, changing the shape of my eyes completely, my mouth is lavender and puffed. In my throat the egg has shrunk to a grain of rice.

After this latest incident I have a sheaf of prescriptions and referrals—almost as many as when I was a child. As a kid I existed among a flotilla of specialists around Akron and Cleveland: the ear, nose and throat guy, the optometrist, the dermatologist, and of course the allergist. By age seven I was unimpressed with needles thanks to my weekly allergy shots. At first the nurse told me to kiss my mom when they jabbed me, but soon I was strolling in alone and slouching in my chair, my arm flung out at the nurse, casual as a junkie.

Though I knew the consequences I often couldn't resist doing things that would send me into allergic attacks. I would count the sneezes, because I couldn't do anything else while they went on. Thirty, forty, fifty. I reacted badly to pollen, grass and ragweed, but nevertheless at my brother's baseball games I joined the other kids in hurling ourselves down a steep, weedy hill. Our bodies left a series of flattened lanes in the grass. Clunky in sneakers, our feet kicked up the grass cuttings, and before I finished my first roll I knew I was in trouble. My eyes were beginning to water and I had already sneezed once on the way down. My skin was smeared with green juice and bent sticks of grass like bug legs. Nevertheless I figured I had a couple more rolls in me before I would have to stop and take a few of the red tablets my mom carried for moments like this.

I remember all of that, but until I found myself in the hospital again I had forgotten the hive-y summer when I was three and my doctors forbade me to touch everything worth eating. No wheat, dairy, mayonnaise or eggs, no nuts, no chocolate. (Expensive shellfish, which no one in Stow, Ohio was wasting on a toddler, barely warranted mention.) My parents served me steamed rice, soy milk, carob chips, and fruit. My protests have not been recorded.

The hives went away and the doctors told my parents to give me forbidden foods again, one by one. One week they gave me cheese, then a chocolate bar, then an egg salad sandwich, a few roasted peanuts. I accepted each one contentedly, with no ill effects. We had moved on to new specialists by then, anyway. I needed glasses, I had broken my arm, I was prone to sinus infections and nose bleeds. I was not the pretty toddler I had been before the doctors, but my skin remained clear of hives no matter what I ate. For the rest of my childhood and into adulthood, I forgot I ever had a problem. I learned to eat fearlessly in the interest of culinary research and greed. I tore the heads off shrimp and lobster, ordered tripe and thymus glands. I made noises of distant sympathy for a friend with a fatal nut allergy that required him to tote an Epi-Pen as we ate our way through Italy and France.

Now, after the second attack in six months, I try to be afraid. I fake little shudders when I read recipes for linguine and shrimp, pad thai, any of the things I used to eat so frequently.

I still want them.

When my husband catches me at a restaurant without my Epi-Pen, he scolds me. Thereafter, as we leave the house, Steve blocks the door and says accusingly, "You have it?"

At another tapas bar with my sister I nibble a piece of calamari, reasoning it is not shellfish. Lately I have been eyeing menus at sushi restaurants, wondering how one categorizes a sea urchin. As I spear another piece of squid, my sister looks at me like I'm sipping strychnine.

"It's a cephalopod!" I protest. For a moment she seems unable to speak.

At least she too is restricted. She is pregnant: no crumbly, damp cheese for her, no wine or margaritas out by the pool. Still, she wins. At a restaurant she orders crab enchiladas and I sigh and look at her plate. She is smiling fondly at it: rich white strands of crab sigh forth from a soft golden corn tortilla, bright with salsa verde.

"That's just fine," I tell her bitterly. "You enjoy that crab and I'll just take a big sip of my wine."

I have made an appointment to find out exactly what I reacted to. I am hoping for shrimp, just shrimp. I can do without it, however delicious those monumental prawns in the Village were. I have had a lot of shrimp in my lifetime, but there are never enough clams and lobster to satisfy me. I courted my husband with a recipe for garlicky clams, which I never admitted was incredibly simple. When he moved all our things into the first apartment we shared I thanked him with lobster risotto. It can't just be chicken for me.

Having grown up far from seafood in the Midwest, I have waited a long time for New York City. The best we could do in Ohio was an infrequent splurge on littlenecks and lobster. That was the only time my parents hated to share. Normally I would barge in on their special parents-only meals and get samples of steak and sips of wine, but at lobster time my mother set her mouth, cut me a tiny bit of lobster tail and knocked the excess butter off with a sharp rap of her fork against the china cup.

While it awaited this fate, the seafood went into the refrigerator. There it was disturbed periodically by the children, who were interested in the brown paper bag that moved. We would open it stealthily, look into the bright eyes of the doomed lobster and feel a bit sorry for it as it weakened. It hardly bothered to stretch its antennae after awhile. I ate it anyway.

The allergist enters the room with a rack full of irritants. The nurse has dotted me with black magic marker, four long rows of twelve each on the white flesh of my forearms. The tray holds rows of small plastic rods, each soaking in an individual puddle of allergen. They stab me with them one by one, tossing the used sticks in the garbage. Down row after row, my arm erupts in stings, spreading crimson archipelagos across my skin. Grass, dust mites, pollen—vicious little jabs in some of the most sensitive skin I have. I refuse to cringe. Egg whites, chocolate, wheat. Just like when I was a kid. My arms sting and itch and I am not allowed to move them. Immobilized, I sit with my palms turned up and a pillow in my lap, watching my skin all but bubble in anger. "Don't move," barks the nurse. Peanuts, shrimp, lobster.

It's a bit of a mystery, says the allergist.

In the test I reacted only mildly to foods I have eaten without incident many times. The shrimp barely showed up. He suspects it is an issue of combination: alcohol, an allergen, and exertion like dancing—in other words, "fun"—and next thing I know I am in the hospital. But we can't say for sure. I could be wrong about the whole shrimp guess. Maybe it's peanuts. But maybe it's almost anything.

The allergist gives me a pamphlet on anaphylactic shock. Among the symptoms: "a sense of impending doom." I remember that cab ride to Beth Israel.

Whatever the trigger is, it's hiding in my system, warning me to eat the vegetables, the pasta, to sip a glass of someone else's wine, not to dance. I imagine myself in rural foreign countries, trying to find my way to a derelict hospital with my empty Epi-Pen. I have always wanted to go to Thailand, where the magnificent street food is rife with sprinkles of dried shrimp, which I can't bring myself to discount. I know enough to fear the French, whose stocks might draw their sweetness from invisible pounds of shrimp heads. It doesn't matter to me what the allergist said; I'm convinced it was the shrimp we tore apart so happily. So no more shopping trips for giant head-on prawns on Grand Street, no more bragging rights about eating shrimp brains, any more than I still hurl myself down the hill through the grass. I will probably have to prepare flashcards for myself for every foreign country I ever visit. So much for my food writer's voracity.

Faced with another grilled shrimp, one curled naked and beheaded in rice, I might not fear it. But one that is lipstick—bright, its tough shell shining and its pearly black eye trained on meÉ I can tell I have grown tentative, still believing that plunge into shock was an issue of offense rather than biology. I have a vision of myself in the tapas bars and sushi counters of the future, watching the people around me scarf up sea creatures while I sip my tea sedately, nibble grilled zucchini or pickled radishes, doomed to maintain a respectful distance.