Today I took Emily to an Allergy specialist. As some of you know, Emily is allergic to milk. And soy. And peas. And turkey... After the turkey incident I decided to go see an allergy specialist instead of the gastro. Technically what we have are food protein intolerances. That means your body cannot digest the food proteins in a specific food. Peoples reactions vary in severity, but it usually includes bloody diarrhea and vomiting. Our vomiting is more along the lines of severe reflux, not projectile vomiting, but it is still a problem. The issues here are that you can become anemic from losing blood through your intestines, you suffer the discomfort of reflux/vomiting and diarrhea, and children stop eating and suffer from failure to thrive. Food intolerances are difficult to predict because you can't test for them. You have to just eat a food and see what happens. Then you put it on the good list or the bad list. You also have to hope that you never find a food to which you are so intolerant that it puts you in the hospital. That happens occasionally, and is unpredictable. The doctor said he has one child that is deathly intolerant to corn, but it never shows up on any of his blood work. Anyway, to make sure we didn't have any other true allergies (the immune system anaphylactic shock kind) we did the food allergy test today. While Emily has no severe, life threatening immune system allergies, we did test positive for peas and oranges. That means we are both allergic AND intolerant to peas. And stay away from orange juice. Otherwise it will be a guessing game with the foods. No soup for you!
This picture is a little old, but I thought it was a funny picture of Emily. We'll call it her "No peas, please!" face.
