My four year old daughter looks like a healthy, happy, though lean, pre-schooler. Although she is perhaps not aware of full reality of her predicament she does know that she has food allergies and must check with mum before consuming other people’s food. Her allergies were a shock to us all, and had a fairly innocuous beginning. When she was seven months old and fairly well established on solids I introduced dairy in the form of yoghurt. Following the general recommendations of serving a small amount of the food every day for a week to test for any reactions, I assumed she had no problems with it. The following week I gave her a whole tub of baby yoghurt for lunch. After lunch she became restless and irritable so, assuming she was a bit over tired from our grocery expedition that morning, I tucked her into her cot and left her to sleep. Within 15 minutes she was screaming and when I looked in on her she had vomited the entire yoghurt and was covered in hives. Her lips were swollen and her eyelids too. I was in a panic. I rang the local hospital – we lived 20km out of town – explained the situation and hightailed it into town. Within minutes of admittance she was given prednisone and within an hour she was back to normal. The doctor told me it could be an allergy to the yoghurt or something in the yoghurt as it was flavoured. Crisis averted, I returned home. A fortnight later I gave my daughter a mouthful of cheese stick. She had no sooner swallowed it than she had brought it back up and the reaction continued as before but much faster. We drove into the hospital where she was treated again and she was diagnosed as being allergic to cows milk. As I was breastfeeding this wasn’t a huge drama, or so I thought. I continued her on solids but didn’t give her dairy products at all. But she continued to suffer incredible constipation, often screaming when passing bowel motions despite my best attempts to improve this – I tried every remedy available with no success. In the end my daughter, who was born at a whopping 4.58kg (over ten pounds) was at eight months of age diagnosed as failing to thrive having fallen from the 95th percentile to the 10th. She was a big head on a tiny frame, pale, lethargic and with dark circles under her eyes. She would later fall further, to the 5th percentile and remain there for months. Our local health clinic nurse and GP referred us to allergy specialists and at nine months of age she was diagnosed as being allergic to dairy, wheat, soy, eggs and nuts. She was also placed on an elimination diet which I was told to follow too. You see, although I had not been giving my daughter dairy, I had still been consuming it and as such the allergen was still attacking her body via my breast milk. Inadvertently I had been causing, at the very least contributing, to the decline in my daughter’s health. I was pretty upset to say the least. In order for her to regain her health if I wanted to continue to breastfeed I had to go on the same diet. Sadly, my milk dried up on this new diet and we were forced to put her on a prescribed formula. This was her main source of nutrition for over twelve months. Unfortunately for us and our daughter we felt her treatment with this initial allergy specialist was not acceptable and frankly, unhealthy (she was on an elimination diet for nearly twelve months when she should have been on it for no more than three weeks) and we sought a second opinion. Just prior to her second birthday she was retested and we were able to reintroduce into her diet wheat and soy which became her milk source as opposed to the formula. The following year, just a week before her third birthday, she was shown to have outgrown her milk allergy and celebrated her birthday with an ice cream cake. At the same time however we discovered that her nut allergies were quite severe. During an in hospital food challenge our daughter suffered anaphalaxis. This was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. She, thank the Lord, has all but forgotten what happened. Now it appears she is also less sensitive to egg and will be retested later this year at another in hospital food challenge. Her skin prick test results to other nuts are currently too high to even consider testing her sensitivity in a food challenge – basically she wouldn’t make it through the challenge without having an allergic reaction of some sort. Now a happy and outgoing 4 year old our daughter seems to have the world at her feet. But her allergies continue to be life threatening. Even enrolling her in preschool this year, and ‘big’ school next year, is fraught with danger and mountains of paper work. I am forced to entrust my daughter into the care of teachers and staff who, although they have had the requisite anaphalaxis training, have never witnessed it. I must trust them to make the right call at the time and act appropriately. This is a scary reality, for if they fail to do so, I will lose my daughter forever. I pray constantly for my daughter’s safety because the reality is that only one child has to bring a peanut butter sandwich along in their lunchbox for my daughter to be in danger.
Originally posted 2014-05-21 22:22:14.