Natasha Amoretti and her daughter.

When Natasha Amoretti was just four years old, she ate a cashew nut. Minutes later, she was covered in hives, her throat was swelling up, and her stomach was in agony.

Her mum was having a dinner party and, thankfully, one of the guests was a doctor. He took one look at the four-year-old and declared she was experiencing anaphylaxis – a severe and potentially deadly allergic reaction.

She was rushed to hospital and treated, before being told she’d need to carry an EpiPen, and was given a vague diagnosis of a nut allergy.

“It was just a blanket statement of: you’re allergic to all nuts,” the now 35-year-old told HuffPost UK.

It was a pivotal moment in her childhood. “I went from being this child that ate everything to being so scared of food,” she explained.

She would check the packets of food and convince herself they contained nuts, even if they didn’t. “I lived with, what I didn’t know at the time, was anxiety,” she said.

Amoretti summed up what every child, and parent of a child, with an allergy routinely experiences. As a youngster she would go to her friends’ homes and would witness the “sheer panic” on their parents’ faces as they checked the back of packets of food.

“It made you feel like you’re the problem,” she said, “and that it was an inconvenience to have you there. I always felt like I was putting people out, I always felt like I was an inconvenience, and I think that definitely impacted my self-worth growing up.”

Given her history, it’s perhaps no wonder that Amoretti was riddled with fear and anxiety when she had a daughter of her own.

It was during the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown. Her home is in rural Devon – hardly around the corner from a hospital, should anything go awry.

The mum also has multiple sclerosis (MS) and developed epilepsy months........

© HuffPost