Last kiss sends haunting message
Girl’s shocking death a lesson about keeping allergies secret, mom says
MONTREAL— A deadly kiss laced with peanut butter that killed a 20-year-old Quebec woman is serving as a tragic public-health lesson about a little-known source of allergic reactions. Myriam Ducré Lemay would have turned 24 today. Instead, she is sending a powerful message from beyond the grave, said her mother, Micheline Ducré.
“It’s as if my daughter was talking to me and said, ‘Maman, I never thought I could die from this,’ ” the Sherbrooke resident said in a telephone interview. “She was 20 years old and probably said to herself that if something happens she would have the time to get to the hospital or the paramedics would come and save her.”
It was the night of Oct. 11, 2012, and Ducré Lemay was at a party with a new boyfriend. At around 3:15 a.m. the next morning, the couple returned to his house. While she prepared for bed, he went for a snack — toast and peanut butter.
In bed, the couple began kissing. Before long, Ducré Lemay felt “uncomfortable” and used a Ventolin pump that she was carrying in her purse, according to the Quebec coroner’s report.
After realizing that her boyfriend had consumed peanut butter, she told him to call 911, but her condition deteriorated quickly while he was on the telephone, so much so that he had to begin performing CPR. Eight minutes later, paramedics arrived and found her breathing, but with a weak pulse. Her throat was closed so tightly they were unable to insert a breathing tube.
The paramedics gave her a shot from an Epipen, but Ducré Lemay’s heart stopped beating before they could get her to the nearest hospital in Saint-Eustache, north of Montreal.
A medical evaluation by hospital staff showed her brain had been deprived of oxygen and there was a risk of brain damage. She was removed from life support later that evening.
The girl’s boyfriend was devastated and in shock, Ducré Lemay’s mother said. “I took him in my arms and told him that it wasn’t his fault, that I felt his pain as much as my own,” she said.
A police investigation showed that Ducré Lemay had never told her boyfriend of her allergies, which were well-known to all of her friends but which she believed she was outgrowing, according to the coroner’s report.
It was, perhaps, for that reason that she neither wore a Medic-Alert bracelet nor carried an Epipen, an injectable dose of potentially lifesaving medicine to be administered in the event of an allergic reaction.
Four years later, Ducré said she has missed her daughter every single day since her death. She has only recently decided to speak about her loss in the hope that the incident will highlight how crucial it is for people with
“I took him in my arms and told him that it wasn’t his fault, that I felt his pain as much as my own.” MICHELINE DUCRÉ DUCRÉ LEMAY’S MOTHER, ABOUT HER DAUGHTER’S BOYFRIEND
allergies to carry a visual reference of their condition.
“If her boyfriend had seen the Medic-Alert bracelet, he would have asked her what she had and he would have known that she was allergic to peanuts, to nuts, to shellfish,” Ducré said.
Dr. Christine McCusker, the head of Pediatric Allergy and Immunology at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, said in an interview that a deadly allergic reaction triggered in this manner is “infinitesimally rare.”
“This is just a series of really unfortunate events: that she didn’t disclose that she had a food allergy, that he chose to eat peanut butter that night and it was so proximal to the time of them kissing. If he’d waited an hour, would it have been different?”
But the incident also highlights a potential method of allergen transmission — oral contact, or kissing — to which teens and young adults are particularly vulnerable, experts say.
In 2002, doctors at the University of California, Davis, School of Medicine, wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine about a survey of 379 subjects that showed a small but significant number had experienced reactions after a kiss.
“Since one third of our subjects (who had a reaction from a kiss) had a reaction while dating, teenagers and young adults in particular need to be informed about this mode of exposure to allergens,” the authors of the study wrote. “Patients of dating age who have severe food allergies may need extra encouragement to tell friends about it.”
Children and teens often lack a true understanding of their conditions and the risks because they’ve been shielded and protected from the dangerous substances, Dr. McCusker said. “They can’t say that ‘when my mouth feels tingly like this and I’m feeling this tightness in my throat that means that I might have ingested something that I shouldn’t have.’ ”
The other problem is that teens tend to shun anything that might mark them as different from the rest, such as a Medic-Alert bracelet or an Epipen — even if that puts their lives at risk, McCusker said.
In Ducré Lemay’s case, she wished greatly to have outgrown her allergies, her mother said. She had worn a Medic-Alert bracelet in the past and had at times carried an Epipen in her purse too.
“But this time she didn’t,” said Ducré. “Even if she had had an Epipen, the fact that her boyfriend didn’t know about her allergy meant he might not have known how to react. That’s why I’m saying that it’s most important to have the bracelet.”