A mother has revealed the frantic messages she swapped with her allergic son after he realised a snack he had just eaten contained walnuts.
Louise Cadman, 56, urged her 25-year-old son George Cadman-Ithell to get immediate help after he began feeling unwell.
But he had to run for eight minutes to his home as he was not carrying the adrenaline pen prescribed to tackle severe allergic reactions, having never suffered a serious attack before.
Despite paramedics performing CPR, two months on the university graduate is in a vegetative state in hospital with his family fearing he will not recover.
His mother yesterday revealed Mr Cadman-Ithell’s heartbreaking situation to raise awareness of how people with even previously mild food allergies can become catastrophically ill.
He bought a bag of ‘saucissons secs’ salami in Sidcup, south-east
, on September 20 and messaged his mother to say they were ‘nice’.
Seconds later he sent her a second text reading: ‘F*** they contain walnuts!’
Mr Cadman-Ithell – likened to an absent-minded professor by his family – had overlooked the words ‘aux noix’ meaning ‘with nuts’ in French printed on the salami’s packaging.
George Cadman-Ithell, 25, is in a vegetative state in hospital with his family fearing he will not recover after he ate a snack including walnuts
Louise Cadman, 56, has revealed the frantic messages she swapped with her allergic son
It also had ‘with walnuts’ written in English further down.
He was diagnosed when aged five with an allergy to tree nuts – which includes cashews, walnuts and almonds. His worried mother sent him a series of messages asking if he was okay and urging him to get medical help.
Mr Cadman-Ithell ran home, where his husband Joe Nolan, 25, administered his EpiPen.
But he went into cardiac arrest and his brain was deprived of oxygen for 26 minutes, causing severe brain damage.
He remained in a vegetative state at a rehabilitation unit at Northwick Park Hospital in Harrow, north-west London, yesterday.
He is able to open his eyes and breath independently but is incapable of communicating. ‘It’s just destroyed us,’ his mother said yesterday. ‘I can’t bear the thought of this happening to another family.’
He ‘did his best’ to avoid nuts, she told the Sunday Times, but experienced attacks on 15 occasions.
Each time his symptoms eased upon taking antihistamine tablets and he never used his EpiPen. Mr Cadman-Ithell graduated with a first-class degree in urban planning, design and management from University College London two weeks before the reaction and was saving to study for a master’s degree.
Saying she hoped discussing her son’s life-changing experience would help prevent similar tragedies, Mrs Cadman added: ‘If you’ve got an allergy, it can go from being relatively mild to fatal from one attack to the next.
‘This is a time of year when people are trying new foods and eating out and going to people’s houses, and they perhaps become complacent like George did.’
A GoFundMe page to help support Mr Cadman-Ithell’s recovery had exceeded £13,000 last night.
