From the Beginning

Our own food allergy journey began a few weeks after our son was born. He was and is a beautiful baby boy, but I am a bit partial. What started out as baby acne just kept getting worse. After the baby acne came the cradle cap. The pediatrician just said it was a bad case of cradle cap and it doesn't have to be limited to the scalp. So much for all those cute baby pics, all I could see was his broken out skin. Shallow I know, but they are only little babies for such a short time and I wanted to remember those days. Fast forward a few months later. He is so broke out from eczema that there are parts to his skin that are just raw, weeping, oozing open sores. The sores were so bad it worried the nurse all weekend she had never seen such a bad case. I take him into the pediatricians office and the only diagnosis he can come up with is just a real bad case of eczema. His own children suffer from eczema so he definitely can relate. However an offhand remark started me thinking about him being 'sensitive' to certain foods. The ped mentioned that when his wife ate eggs his son's eczema would flare up. I was breastfeeding, so what I ate, he would get in some form or another. That started my research into food allergies and an elimination diet for myself. The elimination diet was very bland and not very exciting food wise. But I saw improvement almost within days. In ways I did not even associate with food sensitivities. Before the new diet he would spit up all the time and I was changing his diaper constantly, I just figured some babies were like that. His spitting up diminished dramatically and his BMs were now only a few times a day, not every time he nursed and sometimes in between. His eczema improvement was slow and never totally dissipated. But after a month there was huge improvements. I am told it takes 30 days to get diary out of a nursing babies system so it is often called the 30 day miracle.  When I went back to the ped at his 6 month check up I didn't even mention the elimination diet, the pediatrician recommended a food allergy blood test. I was slowly starting to add foods back into my diet and he seemed to react to everything. When the blood test came back I had just eaten scrambled eggs. Needless to say neither I nor the baby got any sleep that night. He was allergic to eggs, amongst other things. It was indeed as if he was reacting to everything. The blood test came back milk, wheat, eggs, soy, and peanuts. With dog and a few other environmental allergies you can't due much about. If the Dr. had just called a few hours earlier I might have gotten a few hours of sleep that night. I was floored. I had figured out the milk, the wheat and eggs were a bit of a surprise. The eggs were confirmed that night with a tummy ache, it had been over a month since I had eaten any eggs. The pediatrician almost was reluctant to tell me the whole list. Pretty much everything was confirmed by accidental exposure like the eggs the morning the results came back. Only a few  other food allergies not on the original list were discovered like pecans from some cross contamination and sunflower oil when I couldn't get the eczema cleared up till I banned anything with sunflower/safflower oil in it. The eczema though well under control, still flares up. The journey has just begun and I am still learning.