We are the people you don’t want to have over for dinner. We are the ones who make everyone’s lives difficult. We are the food exceptionalists who make trouble when a restaurant asks, “does anyone in your party have an allergy?”

Hell yes, we do. How long have you got?

Recently, I was asked this question as I completed a reservation form for a week away at a place where meals are provided. I got halfway through the list when I realised it would have been easier just to attach my immunologist’s latest report, with copious apologies.

Navigating the world as a chronic allergy sufferer puts you in a difficult position; you are constantly required to protect your own safety by putting other people out.

You must disrupt the social flow of that most pleasurable of human interactions – sharing meals – by listing the substances that might kill you if they are included in the meals.

It’s a vibe killer. Who wants to break bread with someone who can’t eat wheat? (Or rye. Or barley.)

So it was with some relief that I read, this week, that the problems of the chronically allergic are finally being treated seriously at the highest political levels. A group of allergy experts travelled to Canberra to launch the Parliamentary Friends of Allergy group, in the hope that political influence will lead to better research and data.

According to Professor Kirsten Perrett, who led the delegation, one in three Australians now have an allergy, yet we have no comprehensive national data on allergic disease. Perrett, who heads the National Allergy Centre of Excellence at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, would like allergy questions added to the census.

Shockingly, there is no consistent data recorded on incidents of anaphylaxis, which can be deadly.

I can offer myself to science. I was born this way – from the time I started on solid food, it became apparent I was allergic to eggs, nuts and dairy. In the ’80s it was not cool to have allergies. There were no commercially available antihistamines that were safe for children and no EpiPens.

The Thai restaurant wave of the 1990s was a cause of constant anxiety for my mother. I had many near-misses.

As I matured, my fortunes improved. I grew out of the dairy and egg allergies. I began to eat cake. I will never take cake for granted.

But for those of us with truculent immune systems, what can be given can also be taken away. This, I discovered last summer, while on holiday in a location inaccessible by motor vehicle, when I had anaphylaxis.

Anaphylaxis is the premium allergic experience.

I imagine it’s like being a firefighter, or a war photographer.

You train for it, you anticipate it, you fear it, and you hope it will never happen. But when it does, there is a strange relief to it – finally, you have met your foe.

Unfortunately, I met mine while kilometres deep in thick bushland, in a national park only accessible by boat. I had previously experienced minor allergic reactions while out running, and so this time, when I was on a long trail run and I felt my face swelling, I was not hugely alarmed. It’s happening again, I thought. How bothersome.

I turned around and sped up. I thought I should get back to the cottage to take an antihistamine. As I ran, I could feel my face swelling and swelling, to the point where I was having trouble seeing out of one eye. My hands turned blood-red and began to itch. I started to become mildly alarmed.

By the time I staggered back to base, my face was disfigured to the point where my daughter, seeing me, burst into tears of terror.

The itching had morphed into all-body hives. The irritation was as close as itching can be to pain; I felt I needed to claw my skin off.

While my body reacted violently, my consciousness burrowed inwards, as it does with shock. I felt light-headed and strange.

As my loved ones moved around me – calling emergency services, and sticking me with an EpiPen in either thigh – I went deep inside myself.

This is bad, I thought. This is very bad.

I was speed-boated over to the mainland. The adrenaline from the EpiPen had me convulsing with full-body shakes, and the discomfort from the itching was unbearable. Once in the waiting ambulance, I asked why we were not moving, and the ambo told me he needed to get an IV into me first. Right now.

He gave me intravenous cortisone and I was rushed to the emergency department, where I could not have been treated with more kindness or care.

My overwhelming feeling, once I was stabilised, was enormous gratitude for the Australian medical system.

And for my loved ones, who, it turns out, have a capacity for dead-calm clinicism in a crisis, which would be scary if it were not so reassuring.

Weeks later, my immunologist gave me a terrible diagnosis – way worse than the anaphylaxis itself.

Wheat-dependent exercise-induced anaphylaxis, or, to use its charming acronym, WDEIA.

It turns out that on top of allergies to peanuts, pistachios, cashews, oats, rye and barley (that’s only the food allergies, but I have a word count here), I have developed a wheat allergy. The wheat allergy is triggered by exercise and augmented by the presence of alcohol in the system, and anti-inflammatories such as ibuprofen.

Reader, all co-factors were present when I went for my fateful bush run.

“If I hadn’t had my EpiPen, might I have died?” I asked my immunologist, who is a renowned expert, and very circumspect.

He paused for a few seconds.

“Probably not,” he said. “It’s hard to say.”

He banned me from wheat, to confirm the diagnosis. A wheat allergy is the worst allergy.

It means no pizza, no pasta, no croissant, no fresh sourdough bread slathered in butter. Nothing bread-crumbed. No pancakes or dumplings. Even soft cheese has lost its allure – for what is cheese without a nice wheaten cracker?

It’s no way to live.

Were it not for the twin joys of chocolate and ice-cream, I would find it difficult to go on.

Even worse, though, is having to explain to people this peculiar thing.

It absolutely sounds like something you’ve made up, either to shroud an eating disorder or to make yourself seem special in some way, like people who proclaim “intolerances” with no medical basis.

It is difficult to understand why my body is intent on attacking itself. It’s hard not to take it personally.

I am already grieving my next trip to Italy. Is it even worth going to Italy? I weep when I think of the croissants that will go uneaten by me in Paris.

I have begun bargaining. Maybe, if I eat a croissant without alcohol, and take no anti-inflammatory medication in the days before and afterwards, and stay immobile after eating it, I will be OK.

You can see how the croissant just lost its spontaneity.

So I am glad there is some political attention on this pernicious problem, which is much more dangerous for children and the elderly than it is for me.

For me, this fresh-hell diagnosis has confirmed what I already knew: life is uncertain and full of risk. You can only survive it if you have quality help on hand, and people who love you even when you’re puffy.