Our Trip to the Allergist

This morning I took my 12 month old Mr. T to the allergist. Our family has been through three allergists (the first one I did not care for, the second was part of Children's and they charge a facilities fee in addition to the co-pay- which meant we were paying almost an additional $500 a year to go to Children's, and the third allergist was totally arrogant and did not care for children, but that is another story). Last summer T tested positive to milk, eggs, peanuts and soy, so in order to continue to nurse him (and keep him off of the hypo-allergenic formula) I went on an elimination diet and took those foods and treenuts out of my diet. It has been a challenging eight months! The soy allergy is a much harder allergy to deal with than milk, eggs and nuts since soy is in a lot of food you would never think about.

Well I went into the appointment thinking that he was still going to be allergic to all the foods he tested positive to last summer. They performed the skin test on T and right away the places they were testing for eggs were huge and then milk followed and it was huge. I kept looking at the soy and I think that it was the smallest of everything they were testing for. T has terrible eczema and so the doctor decided to test him for several fruits, oats, corn, wheat, dust mites, beef, chicken, turkey and pork. After about 20 minutes the doctor returned and confirmed that he was still allergic to milk, eggs and peanuts, but was not allergic to soy (yea!!!). However, that is where the good news stopped. She said that his wheat was questionable as well as beef. So in a couple of weeks I am going to take my little guy off of wheat (gasp!), beef, chicken, turkey and pork (thank goodness he can now have soy). Then I will reintroduce them one at a time and see if taking them out of his diet helps his eczema.

The good news for T was not the only good news we recieved at our appointment. We used to see this doctor with the other children until the hospital started charging us a facilities fee and then we went to doctor #3. Well the first time J went to the allergist he was blood tested and his milk was at a 15 (which is really really high). A year ago he tested at a 4.5 (low) and the doctor today told me it may be a false positive and he may not be allergic to milk at all. So we are switching J back to doctor #2, because she wants to try to introduce milk into his diet (he has not had anything with milk in it for four years since he was nine months old) because he may either be able to tolerate it or may not be allergic to it at all!