Parents and Food Allergies: Dealing with the Unknown Unknowns

Here’s how we found out about my son Shepard’s food allergies. One day in fall 2005, when he was one, he tottered up to my chair and grabbed at the peanut butter sandwich I was eating. I gave him a tiny piece of it and jean took him off to his crib for a nap. Two minutes later he was screaming, badly swollen and bright red. We called 911 and ran for benadryl. I was terrified he’d stop breathing, but he never did and the swelling went down while the medical responders stood by with oxygen. We took the ambulance ride anyway just to be safe.

Every parent of a child with food allergies has a similar harrowing story of that first exposure. After the discovery, life is never quite the same. But we were slow to react fully to our new reality. Oh, we took important steps — carrying epi-pens and ridding the house of peanuts — walnuts too when we noticed they made him break out. But Shep continued to suffer from moderate to severe eczema and we suspected more allergies. It took us another year to get him to a specialist — in retrospect an obvious move we should have undertaken right away. The doctor ordered blood tests and found he had many more allergies: to pecans and other tree nuts, soy, egg whites, shellfish, dust mites and dogs. All were minor relative to the peanut allergy, but we phased them out anyway and started washing his sheets each week for the dust. Since then his skin and problems have cleared up.

There are some important steps in caring for an allergic child that may not be obvious to some parents. That’s another reason this group exists — to help people learn from others who have been through the same experience. If you live in the Hudson Valley and would like to attend our next meeting, please email hvfoodallergy [at] yahoo.com.