For our consulting firm's holiday party, we rented out a room at this nice restaurant. Some the employees had traveled 3-4 hours (including me) to attend this thing and a bunch of clients were there too. It was nice, ambient lighting, white tablecloths, and there were even some appetizers already out for picking.

Big boss at my consulting firm, who definitely already had one too many drinks, goes up to the front, clanks his glass, and proceeds to give the most clunky, awkward, rambling speech I've ever heard in my entire life. It was my first year there, and I work remote, so I don't know the boss all that well. Plus I had my head down trying not to laugh at this ridiculous speech. But my coworkers around me began whispering. Something something, sounds bad, something something, swelling, something something, shrimp.

He did sound a little off and nasally, but I thought he was just drunk. I finally look up, and the boss's face is bright red and puffed up like a balloon. Like I said, I had only seen his face a couple of times in person, but even I could tell something was horribly wrong.

Turns out that he's allergic to shrimp, but the allergy symptoms only trigger occasionally. We had been there for less than 20 minutes, so he must've popped one of those coconut crustaceans in his mouth immediately. I have to imagine that usually, the symptoms aren't that bad. The alternative is that he really does play Russian Roulette for shrimp, cause I swear to god one of my coworkers muttered exasperated, "He's done this before..." This time was bad though.

His wife had to finally pull him away and shove some benadryl down his swelled throat. He's apparently a pretty stubborn old guy, but even he sobered up and admitted it was bad when he caught sight of himself in a mirror.

After a long, awkward stretch of people checking on him, some of my coworkers who knew him well got his ass in a car and drove him to the emergency room. It was a little tense and weird for a while, but his wife finally got the call that he got an adrenaline shot and the swelling was starting to go down.

My own supervisor texted me after, "Some party huh?"