More Stress

Just in case anyone is interested, Barrett had a minor episode with his allergies last Friday night. Of course, once again it's about impossible to pinpoint what caused the reaction.  He has an appointment with the allergist next week to see if we can figure anything out.  I was being lazy and bought some frozen pizzas for dinner that night.  I read the labels as I always do and the label on the pizza he ate said "Made in same facility with milk, eggs, soy and wheat."  There was no mention of nuts whatsoever.  

About a half an hour after after we ate Barrett started coughing  a little, so I checked on him and asked him if he was okay.  He said, "The pizza hurts my teeth." I looked him over for hives and checked to see if his lip was swollen.  Everything looked fine but I gave him some Benadryl just in case.  He then pronounced himself, "I just fine, Mommy."  He went upstairs to his room to play Lincoln Logs with Justin.  About 15 minutes later I heard Justin shouting for me so I grabbed the Epi-pen and ran upstairs.  Barrett had thrown up and was screaming, "My tummy hurts."  I told Justin that I thought we needed to give Barrett the Epi-pen and he said, "How we do know it's from his food allergy?  Kids just throw up sometimes."  We decided to give it a few minutes and by the time I got Barrett cleaned up he was acting fine and wanted to keep playing with his Lincoln Logs.  I was pretty stressed out and on edge and one of us stayed right with him for the rest of the evening.  

At about 10:30 p.m. our little night owl started coughing again, so I looked him over and he had hives all over his back.  That verified that the vomiting episode was due to something he ate that he shouldn't have eaten.  I gave him another dose of Benadryl and then called my allergist's office and got the on call Dr. because I wasn't sure if I needed to inject Barrett with the epinephrine at that point.  After talking on the phone with her for at least 15 minutes I decided to give him some more Benadryl and to hold off giving him the Epi-pen unless he got worse.  The thing that really decided it for me was the fact that Barrett was happily playing games on the computer.  He wasn't acting at all distressed.  The second dose of Benadryl cleared up the hives and he didn't cough again, so we didn't have to use the Epi-pen after all.  We did stay up until 1:30 a.m. in case he had a relapse.  Needless to say we didn't get a great night's rest.  Barrett woke up crying a few times during the night as well, but quickly fell asleep again each time.  

The allergist said that we did the right thing and in retrospect it all worked out well, but when we were in the middle of it all and I was trying to decide what to do it was so hard.  In my attempt to educate myself about food allergies I've done a lot of reading and I've read several times that the Epi-pen works the best and is most likely to prevent serious anaphylaxis and death when given within 20 minutes of when the symptoms occur.  I kept thinking, he seems fine now but what if he all of a sudden collapses and I've waited too long to give him the Epi?  I can't decide which is worse: 1) He has a new undiagnosed allergy.  (This is what the on call allergist suspects.)  OR 2) I can't trust the labels on any processed food and will have to make all his food from scratch from now on.  

The only other things he ate that night were some Stonyfield Farm yogurt smoothie and I can't imagine that it had nuts in it and at about 4 p.m. that afternoon he had eaten some soy ice cream.  The ice cream label states that there are other flavors that do contain nuts processed on the same equipment, but that they take allergens very seriously and  have stringent measures in place to prevent cross contamination and test all their frozen desserts for traces of allergens. He has eaten this brand of ice cream several times, but it was a new carton that he ate from on Friday.  I think it was the pizza mostly because that's what he was throwing up and then once that was out of his body he seemed fine.  Hopefully the allergist will be able to figure something out, but I'm not counting on it.