Awww, Nuts!

Today I took Garrett to see the Pediatric Allergist. It was a quite a traumatic day to say the least. The Allergist first met with me in his office to discuss Garrett's symptoms and which specific food we were most concerned with (milk, eggs, oat). He then recommended that we do skin allergy testing. Basically what they do is poke the skin with different types of allergy serums, wait 15 minutes, and then check to see if there was a reaction. The nurse said that it would feel like being poked repeatedly with a toothpick. I, personally, think that sounds awful. Garrett needed to be tested for 25 different allergens, which meant 25 pokes. He did such a great job and didn't even start to get upset until they were about half way through. He ended up only reacting to one of the serums.....Peanuts! I was in shock. I had not even considered that he might have a peanut allergy. The doctor said that he was pretty impressed with the size of Garrett's reaction and also that it is highly unusual for a child of his age to have such a reaction to nuts this early on. He also said that even though the skin test for milk, eggs, and oats was negative, he does feel that Garrett probably has an allergy to those things. He said that it is possible that the allergy serum was not a high enough concentration to trigger a reaction. So, he recommended that we do some blood testing. Basically, without getting into too much detail, the blood test will measure the exact amount of antibodies in his body for each allergen. No antibodies present means no allergy to that food, the higher the antibodies, the more allergic he would be. The test is very specific, so he had to specify which antibodies were to be checked. We decided to check for Peanuts, milk, eggs, and oat. He felt that this would be a good starting point and we will be returning to follow up with him in 3 months. Then it was off to the lab. This was probably the worst part of the entire day! Garrett had to have his blood drawn for the test and, in my nursing opinion, the phlebotomist sucked! It took forever for her to hit his vein & all the while I was trying to hold him still in my lap while he was screaming. It seemed to take forever and got even worse when Garrett started crying out "Dadadada". "I know, honey, I wish Dada was here too", was all I could say. It will take about 2 weeks to get the blood test results back, so we will have to wait patiently (because I'm such a patient person)! The allergist did say that it is likely that Garrett would outgrow any allergy to milk, eggs or oat, but unlikely for him to outgrow the nut allergy. I guess we will now be Peanut (and all other tree nuts) free household from now on :(