Inen's Allergies, Part 2

A while ago I promised that I would give an account of what we found out from the appointment with the allergist. So here is what went down:

At the allergist appointment we ended up not drawing blood for a RAST test, but instead the doctor recommended just doing a simple skin prick test for the biggest concerns. When we told him about Inen's previous two reactions, he concluded that the second one had to have been the cashews. They did not do skin tests for the cashews or peanuts, figuring that those are definite known allergies, and not wanting to cause a severe reaction by administering the test. What they tested for was cats, dogs, dust, wheat, soy, sesame, citrus, milk, hazelnuts, walnuts, pecans, almonds, and tomatoes.



So what this test, past experiences, and the previous RAST test tell us that Inen is allergic to

• milk protein (casein)


• eggs


• peanuts


• cashews


• pecans


• and walnuts

is slightly sensitive to

• almonds

and is not allergic to

• cats


• dogs


• dust


• wheat


• soy


• sesame


• citrus


• tomatoes


• and hazelnuts.

We are very relieved and thankful to find that he is not allergic to wheat, soy, or sesame (yay! he can have tahini!); and especially that he is not allergic to hazelnuts. That is the one nut that we have in abundance in our area, so we can get them from the farms and know that they were not processed with any other nut. It's also good to know that while he has allergies, they are limited, and the things he can still eat make his diet very very do-able. Praise God!

We are still going to look into a full panel of foods just so that we aren't having to do trial and error so often. There are still allergies that can pop up that we haven't tested for, so it will be good to know. In fact, we may have found a new one on Saturday while preparing for his birthday party: chocolate. We'll keep y'all updated if we find anything out about that.

Inen's Allergies

So I said in my last post that I would let people know about Inen's allergies. Here's a brief overview of the story so far:

We picked up on his allergy to milk protein in January. He had really bad eczema, and we figured that it was related to diet. Korie gave up milk, and in a few weeks his eczema had largely cleared up. We know it's milk protein (casein, possibly whey), because Korie and he could still have things with lactose in it - which is milk sugar, not protein - without problems. Then one day several months ago I was playing with Inen and kissing him on the face and neck when he broke out into hives, and his neck started turning red and getting swollen. We gave him Benadryl and the symptoms abated in a few minutes. Thinking about what may have triggered it, the only thing we cold figure was that I had just eaten a peanut butter sandwich before playing with him. At this point we made an appointment to have him tested for a peanut allergy. Korie had also noticed that he was fussier when nursing after she had eggs for breakfast, so we had them test for an egg allergy while they were at it. (Later I would wish that we had just had them test for everything, since it was pretty traumatic – mostly for me, I'm sure – to have this tiny baby stuck with a large needle to have blood drawn from his teeny-tiny arms.) When the test came back, it showed that Inen is on the lower end of the "Highly Allergic" part of the scale for eggs, and at the higher part of the "Highly Allergic" part of the scale for peanuts.

We have an appointment with an allergist early tomorrow morning to get him tested for... well, everything. We'll let everybody know what the results are when we get them.