Allergies

Back in April and May, we had Charlie at the doctor about once a week for sneezing and coughing types of symptoms. After about 6 weeks of that, he finally came down with an ear infection and 10 days later, we followed up with our normal doctor to verify it was gone. She walked in and said "why have you been here so much lately?" Now this is why we love her! Yes, doc, why have we been here so much lately??! After discussion Charlie's symptoms with her and discussing our family history of allergies, she decided to order the blood work to test for some common allergies, including food allergies.

Our little buddy came back with a moderate peanut allergy and an egg white allergy. We got an epi-pen and carry it with us now, JUST IN CASE he comes in contact with nuts. We are under strict orders not to allow him to have any nuts.

We followed up with my allergist and he was immediately concerned for Charlie's skin. Charlie has always had eczema and we thought it was just that. After asking us to with hold ANYTHING with egg in it and working on his skin with lotion and hydrocortisone, his skin cleared up instantly. Poor kid!! The eggs in foods were driving his skin crazy.

So...after that worked to clear his skin, they did some further allergy testing, mostly with food because he's too little for environmental allergy testing yet. Here's the picture of the testing. You can see Kenny in the background asking what I'm doing. Well, taking a picture, of course.

Turns out the little guy can't have eggs or anything with eggs in it either. The eggs were making his skin worse and as soon as we stop them, he clears up and is eczema free. So, on the advice or our allergist, we stay away from eggs and nuts for the long term. Eggs will probably be retested in 1 year to see if he has grown out of it yet.

Our hope is for him to grow out of both of these allergies and he has a pretty good chance of doing that with egg if we can be strict with his diet. Nuts, well, that's another story. The chances are much lower that he will grown out of it, but there is a possibility.