By JON MURRAY
The Indianapolis Star
INDIANAPOLIS - Five years after developing a rare - and potentially fatal - food allergy to paprika, Emily Kysel has learned that the peppery red spice is nearly impossible to avoid.
It isn't enough to scrutinize the foods she eats, avoiding barbecue and fried chicken. So sensitive is her allergy that even the air she breathed at work posed a threat of paprika wafting from co-workers' lunches.
Desperate to protect herself, Kysel thought she had found the perfect line of defense: a $10,000, specially trained paprika-sniffing pooch named Penny.
But there was a problem. On the first day Kysel brought the golden retriever to her job at Indianapolis' code enforcement office, one of her co-workers suffered an asthma attack. The co-worker was allergic to Penny.
Kysel says the city told her to leave the dog at home or take unpaid leave. Two days later, on Jan. 27, she filed a discrimination complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She has not returned to work.
In March, Kysel said, she turned down the city's only settlement offer: $1,000 in exchange for confidentiality, dropping the EEOC complaint and agreeing not to sue or ever seek a city job again.
"I'm not looking for a payday," said Kysel, who, along with the city, is awaiting the EEOC's finding. "I'm not going to give up very easily."
Greg Fehribach, an Indianapolis attorney representing the city in the EEOC matter, declined to discuss the case. He said the city recognizes the importance of accommodating employees' disabilities.
"The city in no way violated the law," Fehribach said. "It's the city's position that we were reasonable in our accommodation not only for this particular employee, but for all of our employees."
As Kysel portrays it, her bosses refused to consider a compromise, such as restricting the dog's movements or transferring Kysel to other city buildings that allow service dogs.
She has applied for other city jobs since then, she said, but has received no response.
Claims based on food allergies are less settled under federal law than other disabilities covered by the Americans With Disabilities Act, especially in the workplace. An employer's duty is to accommodate reasonable requests that won't require "undue hardship."
But disputes over food allergies are more common in education - think of children's peanut allergies, which have prompted many schools to ban peanuts from buildings.
Kysel, 24, first experienced a severe reaction to paprika as a junior at Indiana University. Since then, the Michigan City native has gone into anaphylactic shock, a severe reaction, many times, each seemingly worse than the last.
To stop them, she relies on an inhaler, a jab with an anti-allergy injection or even a visit to an emergency room.
"Until I had the allergy, I couldn't even tell you what (paprika) tastes like," Kysel said. "And now I know it tastes like fire."
Chris Kuczynski, assistant legal counsel at the EEOC and head of its ADA policy division, declined to comment on Kysel's claim, which still is being investigated. The employee who was allergic to Kysel's dog has not been identified.
"This does come up, and it does come up with service animals when people have rather serious allergic reactions to the animals," Kuczynski said. The difficulty comes in treating each employee equally, he said.
The Department of Code Enforcement, where Kysel began working in March 2009 as an analyst, responded by educating coworkers after Kysel experienced the first of several allergic reactions.
S
he remembers one reaction was set off by a co-worker eating chicken wings at a desk across the room from hers. "I just happened to walk past her desk," Kysel said.
Some co-workers snickered at her condition, she said, but others expressed concern. The city agency banned paprika from the lobby of its building and asked employees to eat in the break room.
As her reactions intensified, Kysel contacted a dog-training facility near Austin, Texas, and waited for Penny's months-long training to finish while gaining approval for the idea from her bosses. Her family helped raise some of the $10,000 needed for the service dog.
Kysel said she had worked with Julie Paini, the city's disability affairs director, to smooth the way. But it was Paini, she said, who notified her late on Penny's first day that the arrangement wouldn't work because of the other worker's dog allergy and asthma.
Paini, who was out of the office Tuesday, did not return a message seeking comment.
Kysel said returning to work for the city seems unlikely, even if the EEOC rules in her favor. She hopes to prove a point, suspecting the city would have treated a blind employee with a guide dog differently.
But she sees a silver lining in Penny, who has helped her avert as many as a dozen exposures to paprika, she said. Her last allergic reaction was in October.
"I don't regret getting her," she said. "even though everything went awry afterward."