The Bite 004: Congratulations, You’re a Vegan Now.

By day three in the hospital, we were all in. Alpha-gal mode: activated.

Every medication, every piece of gauze, every spoon of soup was now suspect. I officially became a vegan overnight — not by choice, not by some trendy wellness journey — but because a microscopic vampire tick decided to ruin cheeseburgers forever.

And here’s the real plot twist: symptoms of Alpha-Gal don’t show up right away. They take hours to appear. Which means constant backtracking: What did I eat four hours ago? Was that IV drug derived from pigs? Did that Band-Aid have mammalian gelatin in the adhesive?

(I wish I were being dramatic, but no. That last one’s real.)

It was chaos. I became a crash-course student in medical ingredient decoding.

Every nurse visit was followed by a new rash, a new round of Benadryl, and a fresh wave of panic. We finally realized something horrifying: The very things they were giving me to help… were also making me worse.

Benadryl? Has mammalian products. Gauze? Animal-based gelatin. Adhesive bandages? Same deal. Even the gloves and medical wipes could’ve been triggering.

At one point, we were so twisted in the timeline of symptoms that I was basically playing an allergenic version of Clue. “It was the nurse… with the Band-Aid… in the IV room.”

Then, finally — on the fourth day — I got my bloodwork back.

Alpha-gal Syndrome: Positive.

There it was, in black and white. A name to the madness. A real, confirmed diagnosis. The answer we’d been chasing through steroid injections and midnight breathing treatments.

And just like that… I was released.

Not because I was “better” — but because the hospital couldn’t safely treat something they didn’t fully understand. I needed to control everything now: the food, the medicine, the fabrics, the products. And the only place that was even remotely possible… was home.

So I walked (okay, shuffled) out of that hospital four days after entering as a full-on medical mystery. Still itchy. Still overwhelmed. But now? I had a diagnosis. I had a direction. And I had a brand-new, unrequested identity:

Alpha-gal vegan.