That sucks. I had always heard that cheese doesn't go with seafood. They must have not heard that over there. I've actually never had oysters, clams, or mussels. My wife doesn't like seafood, so we don't eat too much of it. Maybe once a year I will have some salmon and then a couple of times a year I get some fried fish. My wife also doesn't like velveeta, so this would have been a huge no go for her. I remember one time we went to a place and a glass fell and hit the floor and broke. A piece flew up and hit my father in law. He is on blood thinners so he started bleeding and it looked a lot worse than it really was. The staff was freaking out though and ended up giving him a ton of vouchers for free meals.
There are a lot of ways that the broken chair could have made me bleed but I fell inside of it just perfectly so that nothing happened other than me being briefly embarrassed.
I am a bit afraid of seafood to be honest because I have been food poisoned a few times in my life and one of the really bad ones came from oysters. I'm more of a beef guy but we have pretty poor quality beef over here, which is a shame.
When i lived in the States I very rarely ate any sort of seafood so I can totally get how people, especially people that live in the middle like you do, don't indulge very often. Crab legs are pretty great though and we don't have those here at all because as far as I know those only come from Alaska.
Actually, being so close to the Great Lakes we have a lot of options for fish. Probably not the more exotic stuff, but you can go to pretty much any bar around here and find either cod, perch, walleye, salmon, or whitefish. I'd eat fried fish all day every day. I understand your apprehension about eating other seafood. I wish I like shrimp, but I just can't get into it and crab/lobster is so expensive I try to avoid it. The fact that my wife doesn't like any of it makes it easier to not miss all of it. During lent my buddy and I try to hit several fish fries.