Halloween is for babies. Yeah, I said it. There’s nothing even scary about it. Haunted houses? The scariest thing is the admission price. Horror movies? Unless your name is Jordan Peele, you’re not getting a scream out of me. Costumes? I look scarier without a mask on. Come on Halloween, step up your game.

Maybe my standards for horror are so high because I’ve been dealing with something truly horrifying ever since the day I was born. Something that would make Jason Voorhees soil his pants at the mere thought of it. I can’t promise that I won’t traumatize you by sharing it, but I’ll do so anyway. Brace yourself for hell on earth.

A nut allergy. *cue dramatic thunder noise*

Killer ghosts and spirits? No problem. But having to ask my minimum-wage waiter to check the ingredients label of their hamburger buns while everyone else at the table awkwardly waits for our little exchange to be over? Just put me out of my misery.

That’s why I always feel pressured to tip well at restaurants after telling them about my allergy. Multiple times a day, a random guy working the register could literally kill me if they wished I had donated an extra dollar. Now that’s scary. Halloween should take notes.

Needless to say, this allergy sucks. But as a kid, one day out of the year it was actually somewhat badass, and that was on Halloween.

You may think it would be the opposite, which is what I used to think too. All of my friends would be chowing down on Snickers and M&Ms while I was stuck with a handful of Smarties and a pillowcase full of stuff I couldn’t eat.

The worst part is that there were actually some good nut-free candies (Sour Patch Kids have been my GOAT since preschool for that very reason), but then kids without an allergy would snag them before me.

What’s that, Max? You grabbed the last bag of Sour Patch Kids because you aren’t a fan of Butterfingers? Yeah, well, Butterfingers aren’t a fan of me. In fact, they want me dead. But by all means, please take the Sour Patch Kids because they taste better while I’m stuck with another worthless chocolatey peanut brick weighing me down. If you need me, I’ll be stabbing myself with an EpiPen after finding out the hard way that I can’t have 90% of what I’ve collected.

And it really was 90%. Out of the Los Angeles Times’ “official candy bar power ranking,” where their top 30 candy bars are listed, guess how many I can have without taking a fun trip to the ER? 

One. And it’s just the normal Hershey bar. No “cookies and cream” or “special dark” flavors for me.

However, things would soon shift in my favor. As we got older, standard trick-or-treating wasn’t cutting it anymore. And as young children tend to do when they get bored, it was time to form an economy, which is when I discovered the opportunity I had missed out on in the years prior.

After our night out trick-or-treating, we would usually crash at someone’s house for the night and gorge ourselves on what we had scored from our meticulously planned-out route (which just meant walking over to the rich neighborhood where the candy was all king-sized). This was perfect for business. I would set up my supply on a kitchen counter or dining room table and auction off the best goods to the highest bidder. By the end of the night, I would have more money than anyone in the country … or at least it felt that way. I don’t have a Los Angeles Times article to support my over-exaggeration this time.

I learned the game. Hershey’s bars with peanuts were unpopular, Snickers would usually fetch a decent price and I would literally take Reese’s Cups from houses with nut-free options because they were worth so much more long-term. I wasn’t just a kid trick-or-treating, I was an entrepreneur running an underground candy auction fueled by child labor. My life will never be that intense again.

But all good things must come to an end. As my friends switched from getting sugar-high to just regular high on Halloween, I began to realize that the one advantage to my nut allergy had faded away, just as trick-or-treating had.

At least I thought. Despite being forced to declare bankruptcy on my candy marketplace (I guess being open once a year isn’t great for business), the universe gave me one last Halloween to show off what I could do.

To fully appreciate my masterful storytelling, let’s first discuss my least favorite topic ever: eighth grade me. Beyond the obnoxiously blue glasses and horrible side part was a kid who carried an EpiPen with him everywhere he went, which was (and still is) annoying as hell.

I would rather die in the Six Flags parking lot from the overpriced chicken tenders being fried in peanut oil than walk around with this bulky hunk of plastic in my pocket the whole time, and others no doubt feel the same, which is why there have been so many new iterations of the same concept.

The AUVI-Q was the one I saw the most as a kid. Just like an EpiPen, an AUVI-Q is an epinephrine injector, the stuff that prevents an allergic reaction from fully spreading. As someone who has been stabbed with an EpiPen one too many times, I can tell you firsthand that epinephrine acts very similarly to adrenaline. This is because — plot twist — they’re literally the same thing, just renamed. 

According to the National Institutes of Health, when the Japanese chemist Takamine Jōkichi managed to prepare a pure extract of epinephrine/adrenaline in 1901 after years of other chemists’ attempts, he patented it under the name “epinephrine.” Like we do with most stuff, Americans stole Jōkichi’s extraction formula, marketed it as “adrenaline” to avoid copyright and sold it through the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company. However, the formula was not copied exactly, meaning that what the world believed to be a pure extract of epinephrine/adrenaline was actually not. I never paid attention in chemistry class, so I have no clue what makes a “pure” or “impure” extract, but it’s basically the difference between life and death in the event of an allergic reaction.

Eventually chemists and doctors got tired of the confusion between the two substances and just combined them. So while technically adrenaline is a less pure form of epinephrine, nowadays the two terms are used interchangeably.

While literally anyone normal won’t know the difference between the two names for adrenaline, everyone knows what it feels like. You know that feeling when you get off a roller coaster and your heart is racing, you can’t stop talking about how awesome the ride was and you feel like you could run a marathon and still be that hyper? Well, if you don’t feel like paying admission for a theme park, you can just stab yourself with an EpiPen for the exact same feeling (for legal purposes, this is a joke … plus, EpiPens on average cost $700 without insurance, so the theme park would probably be cheaper anyway).

EpiPens, AUVI-Qs and similar products all inject the same stuff for the same purpose: to keep you alive. However, some do this much better than others, and it would take a mildly traumatizing experience for me to realize that.

Let me set the scene for you: it’s the night before Halloween at Saint Raymond School, and eigh8th grade Xander has a volleyball game against Saint Emily Middle School. Our bitter rivals … probably. All I know is that we always lost to them, and considering that I don’t actually remember if it was Saint Emily or Saint James, I was probably the reason for that. 

Regardless, halftime hits and seemingly the only other kid in the school with a nut allergy just pukes on the floor and then books it into the bathroom. It all happened in an instant. One second I’m in the team huddle, the next I’m still in the team huddle, except now my shoes are covered in a ham sandwich, Capri-Sun and  Snickers bar, all in greenish-grey liquid form.

Keen readers might remember how I mentioned Snickers bars are very, very, very not nut-free, and I certainly remember calling my teammate “an idiot” the next day for having one (Spoiler alert: yes, I said “the next day.” Obviously, he didn’t die).

I found him in the bathroom hunched over the toilet, sticking his fingers in his mouth to try to … well, I already went into too much detail on the puke from before. Let’s just say he was trying to get that chocolatey, peanut goodness out of his system for good.

Because the swelling made his neck look like a balloon one exhale away from exploding, I used my EpiPen for the first time in years right on top of his thigh, just like I’ve been practicing on fruit since I was six years old, and he ended up being fine after a night spent in the ER.

I exited that bathroom not only as a student, not only as a hero, but as an athlete dedicated to his craft. If I could become the most successful candy entrepreneur at only eight years old, save a life halfway through a volleyball game and come back from it all even stronger, was there anything I couldn’t do? Could anything stop me? Was there truly anything in the world I couldn’t accomplish? No. My team went forward from that experience not only as athletes, but as an unstoppable force willing to crush anyone in our way.

I proved that an allergy not only didn’t define who I was, but that it made me unique in ways others couldn’t be. It showed me that even the seemingly worst things in one’s life can bloom into new opportunities; all you have to do is always give it your all. I emerged from it all as a smarter, bolder and better person. One who was ready to crush any obstacles in his way.

We lost the volleyball game. 

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