To start, I want to admit that when I was in school *mumble* years ago, the concept of allergies was sort of new to anyone who didn't live with them daily, and people outside the know didn't take them as seriously as they do now. Nobody was banned from eating peanuts on an airplane. Restaurants were still new to the idea of cross-contaminating allergens. If you were allergic, you simply didn't eat it, or eat in that establishment, but no consideration was really given to anyone who could have a reaction just because someone was eating a PB&J sandwich one seat down.
My mom is allergic to peppers (bell, jalapeno, etc.), and for the uninitiated, the spiciness of said pepper is completely moot. It's not the capsaicin, it's the anaphylaxis that comes from the whole pepper family. (Sorry for the mini rant: this is a thing I still hear even to this day.)
Now me? I have an intolerance. Mom needs to be hospitalized; I unleash The Evil.
Home Economics class existed for the sole purpose of teaching you how to cook. And by teaching you how to cook, I mean kitchen safety and figuring out how to make, read, and follow a recipe. The classroom was partitioned off into multiple "kitchens," with several students per kitchen and various jobs that rotated through the students.
My teacher, a woman whom we shall call "Mrs. Idiot," was a cantankerous, middle-aged, overweight Hagraven of a woman that nobody actually liked. Mrs. Idiot would stomp about during the cooking, squawking in her crone voice about this or that.
"Your dish water is too cold! Wash everything again and use HOT water this time!" (Biiitch, it's hot enough that it physically hurts to put my hands in it.)
"Why haven't you done X yet?! I don't care if Y needs to be done first! Do X immediately, or I'll drop your grade here and now!" (This is literally impossible. How can you be this goddamn spiteful?!)
Mrs. Idiot was also a firm believer in teaching us how to prepare cultural foods. This would have been fine if Mrs. Idiot hadn't also believed, with the fervor of a cultist, that if it didn't have peppers in it, then it was bland and tasteless. That's right, folks. Garlic powder, onion powder, even salt: none of these things actually season foods; they merely enhance the God Known As The Pepper.
I'm sure you're already dreading what's coming.
The first recipe we made had bell pepper in it, and I attempted to explain to Mrs. Idiot that while I didn't have an allergy, I still wasn't advised to eat the food we had prepared. However, since I wouldn't be hospitalized for anaphylaxis by this food, she snappily told me that she expected everyone to eat their portion, since the portions were small. When I tried to explain the horror that was The Evil, she cut me off and said that I needed to be a picky eater and expand my horizons a bit.
My fellow group members were more sympathetic and just set my place without putting food before me. Since they had no such dietary limitations, they were perfectly happy to accept my portion and redistribute it among themselves. Teens and food. I promise, nothing went to waste!
Well, the next recipe was going to be the following week. This time it was vegetable wontons. With, yes, bell pepper as one of the ingredients. And wontons were to be fried in oil.
Well, it just so happened that I had been having other food-related problems, and it turned out that I had an overactive gallbladder. This meant that food that was greasy/oily was not taken well by my digestive tract; it caused horrendous cramps that lasted for hours and enhanced The Evil in ways nobody would enjoy.
Mrs. Idiot was looking straight at me when she told us that she expected everyone to eat their portion of food with no arguing or "skipping out" on trying new things, or else she would be docking entire letters from our final grade for every instance (if you had an A and didn't eat the food just once, you would get a B for the final grade, etc. And she had many recipes, 99% of which had bell pepper somewhere.)
So, let's make sure everyone understands. Peppers cause The Evil. Oily foods act as an enhancer for said The Evil. And I have just been ordered to eat something that would blow right past the perfect storm and straight into an apocalypse.
My fellow students watched me with expressions that ranged from anxious concern to flight, no fight, at the drop of a pin as I forced myself to eat the three wontons on my plate. I had patted as much of the oil off as possible with a paper towel, but knew that this would do nothing to help.
Class ended. Mrs. Idiot looked smugly at me as I left.
My body was beginning to make low noises of unhappiness in the next period. That hour passed with nothing significant happening. However, the period after THAT, the first toll of the apocalypse rang.
In a quiet classroom of about 30 kids, my gut made a sound somewhere between a horny humpback whale and the screams of the damned. I was on my feet and bolting for the door without waiting to be excused, shouting "Mrs. Idiot forced me to eat something that made me sick!" at the teacher and my many, many witnesses, some of whom knew exactly what had happened.
I now had two minutes. Two precious minutes to bolt down the hallway and make it to the bathroom.
I heard a hall monitor shout something (probably about running in the halls, and needing a pass to be in said halls during class time), but the world had narrowed to the Olympic sprint I was doing.
I dove into the bathroom and landed on the toilet just in time. The Evil had arrived.
Agony ripped through my middle, and I doubled over as much as I could on the toilet as I unleashed a substance that probably caused the porcelain to hiss and smoke beneath me. In a haze of pain and misery, I heard the bathroom door click open, a heartbeat of silence as my body made horrendous, unearthly sounds and smells, and a teacher's voice muttering "Jesus tapdancing CHRIST!" before the bathroom door gently closed again.
Five courtesy flushes and a redwood forest of toilet paper later, I hobbled out of my stall, washed my badly shaking hands, and left the bathroom.
The hall monitor turned out to be a teacher who was considered kind of cool; she would use mild swears if something impressed her enough, and the teens loved her for it. She was standing well back from the bathroom door, trying not to clap a hand over her mouth and nose.
With a calm voice that did not match her horrified eyes, she asked me, "What the HELL happened to you, [MyName]?"
Walking like a 90-year-old woman in desperate need of a walker, I explained what Mrs. Idiot had done to me two periods ago.
She was silent for a heartbeat, then said softly, "Come on. Let's get you to the office. We'll send you home."
The walk was much longer than I remembered the halls ever being before, but I was eventually put on a bench while the adults talked in hazy, incomprehensible words. My stomach felt like I had called an Orc a sissy, and he had taught me manners with his fists.
At one point, the principal came to ask me some questions in a very, very gentle voice, assured me that my mom had already been called, and informed me that there was a bathroom out the door and immediately to the right if I needed it.
I did. Twice more.
My poor mom had to come through the front of the school, AND through the cloud of Eau de The Evil to pick me up. Most of what happened later was lost in a haze of cramping, but I can say definitively that Mrs. Idiot was now officially in deep shit.
From what I was told (and this was (mumble) years ago, please accept some fuzziness on some details), the aftermath was damage control, damage control, damage control. The school staff were (finally) taking this seriously, and were making a lot of appeasing noises to my mom, who is one of those "quietly enraged" people who said very little, and what WAS said was in a mild voice, but one look at her face and you knew you had made a terrible mistake.
Mrs. Idiot blew off a lot of criticism from both the principal and my mom. She was still adamant that intolerances weren't allergies and, therefore, triggering them wasn't a big deal. She gave a long rant that can be summed up as:
"[My Name's] life obviously wasn't in danger, so maybe they should just stop coddling a 'picky child.' (I was 16 or 17 at that time, btw). Students need to follow instructions and learn not to mouth off to people who are giving directions, because that is a skill necessary for the work world. Parents who let their kids do whatever they wanted put the burden on society to fix what the parents failed to do. Picky eaters were what she had to deal with, and she was not going to let a spoiled brat get away with such nonsense on her watch."
She held this attitude right up until the principal told her that he would be recommending her to be fired for deliberately harming a student, and yes, he interrupted her, making a minor sick was, in fact, considered 'harm'. Then the switch flipped, and the waterworks and apologies began.
When I returned to school, we had another teacher covering Home Ec, and the recipes no longer involved peppers.