I Was Playing With A Massive Indie Band When I Collapsed Mid-Show. I Couldn't Believe The Cause.
In May of 2023, I played bass for the indie rock band Bright Eyes. During our sold-out show in Chicago, we were about a quarter of the way through the 20-song set when I started feeling queasy. The nausea quickly segued into an overwhelming urge to vomit, which I fought with everything I had while playing and singing backup for Conor Oberst, the band’s founder and lead singer, in front of 3,000 adoring fans.
By the time things started feeling uneasy on the bottom end, I was sweating under the stage lights. I can make it, I told myself. Just a few more songs left. But then the lights started to dim — not the ones onstage, the ones that lit my consciousness.
I could feel my legs buckling and moved to sit on guitarist Mike Mogis’ amp. “Do you mind?” I asked, while he looked up from his pedal steel at me like I was insane. The world was fading and I realized I had to get offstage before I passed out. I had no choice but to leave.
After the song was over, I calmly set my bass on its stand, and walked offstage, pausing only to tell Conor that I was sick and had to leave. I gathered my strength and forced my legs to carry me to the side stage where the tour manager, Katy, looked at me with concern while I slid down the wall. “Orenda, are you OK? Your face is blue,” she said. I muttered something like “trash can,” and the next thing I knew, I was projectile vomiting into broken glass and crushed beer cans with a force I did not know was possible for my body to produce.
A medic appeared from the darkness, his sympathetic face filling my narrow field of vision. He tried to corral me to a stretcher, but there was no time. As the band played on without me, Katy chased me to the bathroom, lifting my dress to rip my thousand-dollar in-ear monitor pack off my pantyhose before I closed the door and my sickness took over. I had been a professional musician, performing onstage for 30 years — more than half my life. This was, by all accounts, my worst performance nightmare come true.
It turns out, I’d had a violent allergic reaction to a dollop of Russian beluga caviar that garnished an appetizer I had consumed three hours before the show. As a kid, I grew up hearing the word “caviar” from my television set in rural Alabama, where Robin Leach of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” bid my family goodnight in his thick British accent with “Champagne wishes and caviar dreams.”
What was on the screen was so far from my reality, it might as well have been filmed on the moon. My family’s eating habits were as erratic as our finances. During feast, we had lavish Southern meals: baked chicken or pork chops, black-eyed peas, thick-cut tomatoes and buttermilk corn bread. But during famine, it was watery potato soup night after night, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, grocery shopping at “bent and dent” stores and overhearing whispers of “how are we going to eat?”
I began to understand when I was about 8 years old, and I started sleeping over at friends’ houses, that I had an unusual family life. My mother was charismatic and different from everyone in our small Southern town. She was an artist and self-professed witch — her tales of black magic, angels and devils populate my earliest memories. Looking back, I see a childhood marked by instability: constant moves, emotional volatility, estrangement, manipulation and fear. But as a child, my father romanticized everything my mother did: She was special, a genius and always right. This insistence of his created the lifelong cognitive dissonance that kept me from seeing the truth. How can any of this be bad if my mother is always right?
The night of the Bright Eyes show was only the second time I’d had caviar. In the summer of 2022 a friend received a tin of it for her birthday and offered to share it with me when she found out I had never had it. I became violently ill afterward. I thought I had food poisoning. It never occurred to me that it could be an allergy. So, when it was offered to me almost a year later, before the show, at a five-star restaurant in Chicago, I didn’t really think there was much of a chance for a repeat performance. Boy, was I wrong.
It wasn’t until my sister sent me an article linking allergies and childhood trauma that I started putting two and two together. I am allergic to gluten, aspartame, adhesive, perfume, hair dye, cats, pollen, mold and dust. My little sister suffers from at least four of these allergies as well.
Before the pandemic, I had instilled strict self-boundaries regarding my communication with my mother: I was careful about if and when I answered her phone calls and I deleted her voice messages and ignored her emails crying for the kind of help no one could give. But when the pandemic hit, I felt sorry for her, alone and scared in this strange new world. I didn’t know what to do — about anything. I let her back in.
Despite my best intentions — my hopes and wishes that things could and would be different — I finally realized the emotional damage I had endured from her control and, more importantly, that things would never get better and, in fact, were likely to get worse. Two years later, in 2022, after having done everything I could think of to maintain a healthy relationship with my parents, I decided to go no contact with them. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. The second hardest thing was writing a book about it.
I always thought of myself as the strong one in the family, the healthy one, the one that got out. But my anxiety, depression, negative self-talk, and, yes, even my allergies, tell a different story. Brock University is investigating how childhood trauma, such as abuse and severe household dysfunction, may lead to a hypersensitive immune environment. This hypersensitivity, termed “allergenicity,” can support the development of asthma, food allergies, hives, eczema, hay fever and other allergies.
In the article my sister sent me from the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Tatiana Falcone states, “In addition to mental illness, victims of child abuse are more susceptible to developing allergies and asthma, autoimmune disorders, osteoarthritis, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders.” Childhood trauma survivors may also be prone to nervous system dysregulation, addiction, chronic pain, headaches, cardiovascular issues, hypertension, obesity, insomnia, nightmares, hypersensitivity to sound and light, and autoimmune disorders. It appears that growing up in a prolonged state of fight or flight causes an overactive nervous system, so childhood trauma survivors are wired to be on edge, constantly vigilant, and navigating an unpredictable world created by those we are born to love the most.
I did not develop my first allergy until I had already left the family home. My mother had kept cats my whole life. She called them her “familiars,” a term Britannica defines as “a small animal or imp kept as a witch’s attendant, given to her by the devil or another witch.” A year after moving out at 17, I became allergic to my mother’s cat and all other cats. I am so allergic that I even sneezed blood once.
Over the next 30 years, my other allergies slowly revealed themselves — little puzzles to be solved in order to stop whatever symptoms had appeared seemingly out of thin air. I believe my complex post-traumatic stress disorder from childhood trauma has kept my nervous system in hyperarousal, always on edge, looking for danger, even when there is none.
After the disastrous show in Chicago, I researched caviar allergies extensively and found they are extremely rare. I could find only one article with a mention, about “allergy triggers for the 1 percent,” because most people never have the privilege of even trying the expensive sturgeon fish roe.
If you told me as a child that one day I would leave my family, leave the South, start a successful indie band and travel the world, I would never have believed you. If you had told me I would drink Champagne and eat caviar, I would never have believed you. Because the Champagne and caviar of “Lifestyles” represented something much more than success, they signified carefreeness, a life of luxury and leisure, of fun — a feeling of lightness I have struggled to find since I can remember. It’s almost fitting that my body would reject it so violently.
The things we experience — as children or at any point in our life — can have a profound effect on how we exist in the world. Science is now telling us just how deeply these events seep into our bodies and express themselves later. I know I am not the only person who is hardwired differently than I should be — than I want to be — because of my early childhood experiences. I can’t change the past. I can, however, decide what I do now, and part of that change includes talking about it. The more we understand how debilitating trauma can be — mentally, emotionally and physically — the more compassion we can have for ourselves and others, and the more prepared we will be to face it and heal.
I may never have that sense of lightness I longed for. Instead, I have a happiness that’s measured and cautious. It is a limitation I am beginning to accept. Kind of like my allergies. I take great enjoyment in things I can have, while also looking out for danger.
Orenda Fink is a musician, songwriter, performer, writer and certified Jungian Depth Coach specializing in shadow work and dream interpretation. Her work has been profiled in NPR, Pitchfork and more. She has been writing, recording and touring since 1997. Orenda got her start in Birmingham, Alabama, with the pop rock group Little Red Rocket. In 2000, she formed the lauded ethereal folk duo Azure Ray with longtime friend Maria Taylor in Athens, Georgia. She now resides in California’s Mojave Desert with her husband, Todd Fink of The Faint, and their dog, Grimm. “The Witch’s Daughter” is her first book. Find out more at OrendaFink.com.
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