Saturday, August 30, 2008

Allergies - Good and Bad

I was trying to think - Is it better to start with bad news and end with good? Or do people prefer to get the good news first and end with the bad? Hmmmm. I think I like bad and then good, so I will go from there!

First the bad news. Sean saw his allergist last week. His scratch test and blood work for milk were still positive but the size of the wheal (hive) and the levels in his blood had decreased a lot. His doc thought we should do a food challenge test in the office. This basically involves going to the office for about two hours and having Sean eat some ice cream and drink some milk. He gets a little every so often and they monitor his reactions. Well, he made it to about 20 minutes and then told me he had to go to the bathroom. I was in the room with Justin who had just had his scratch tests. He was gone a little to long so I went to find him. He was in the bathroom getting sick. My heart sank. I felt so bad that he was sick and so bad that he still had the milk allergy. After he got sick he got a cough and a stuffy and runny nose. Luckily they got him some Zyrtec and things didn't progress past that.

Now the good news. When Justin had his 14 month check-up, the doctor wanted to get blood work for lead and hemoglobin. I asked him to through in an allergy panel - milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, soy, etc. I was worried since both Brian and Sean have food allergies and figured he would still only get stuck once! Well, they called, actually I had to call and then they called back, and said that everything was fine but he tested positive for egg whites and peanuts! No-o-o-!

They wanted me to see an allergist. The poor kid had about twenty pokes on his back to test for all kinds of allergies. And they all came back negative! The allergist wants to retest him in about three months. And he said the blood work was positive, but just barely. He did have high levels of IgE (immunoglobulin E - an antibody), which could be from seasonal allergies and apparently that can mess with the food allergy tests. The allergist seemed pretty certain that he would end up with seasonal allergies. I will take that over eggs and peanuts any day!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Aw, poor Sean. Food allergies suck. I don't have any but I have friends who do. At least Justin doesn't (seem) to have them.

MissNoAngel (find me on Twitter) said...

AWww, what a huge bummer! I remember doing those tests when I was a kid - I never had the food allergy ones, but the scratch tests and then the injections....UUUUGGH. Poor babies. Better to know than not though.

Hope said...

aww they do suck! It makes me think of that movie with the rock and the thinnnnamenn haha

Aimee said...

first poor sean, i'm sorry that happened.
second, this is crazy, but our doc just called with Carter's results today and he is allergic to - yep, egg whites and peanuts!!! what a coincidence!
ick on the poop incident, lol

Anonymous said...

My name is Susan Ward and i would like to show you my personal experience with Zyrtec.

I am 30 years old. Have been on Zyrtec for 3 months now. I thought I was dying! It must be cancer or some disease. I felt that bad. I exercise 6 days a week and I know my body very well. I new something wasn't right but never thought it would be an allergy pill to blame. Within three months these symptoms hit hard. I tracked it back to the day I started taking this medication. The side effects didn't hit me right away. I was just happy to be able to breathe. So I'm assuming the clinical trials for this drug were not long enough to witness these types of side effects. I'd rather deal with the allergies than these side effects. Glad to know others feel the same. I'm not just going crazy.

I have experienced some of these side effects -
Major fatigue, gained 13 lbs in 3 month period very unusaul for me). wild mood swings, major depression, loss of short term memory. Stop taking the pill and fill almost back to normal.

I hope this information will be useful to others,
Susan Ward