Allergies

Emily had her appointment at the allergists on Friday at a leading teaching hospital in the area. The goal was to see if she has outgrown any of her allergies. Since she was a baby she has been allergic to all kinds of foods. They are dairy products, eggs, sesame seeds, walnuts and peanuts. Some of them are worse than others. If she touches anything with peanuts or walnuts, she can stop breathing. She also has some environmental allergens. We thought it was mostly cats, dogs and dust mites.

After speaking to the allergist, she decided against doing the RAST (reactive skin test) because she was afraid that if she put the allergen (like peanuts) on her skin she could go into anaphylactic shock. So she tested for the foods through a blood test. This way she could also see the level of the allergen that way. We are waiting the results of the blood test.

She did do the skin test for the environmental allergies. Basically, it seems that Emily is allergic to everything but air!!! She had an immediate and big reaction to dust, dust mites, feathers, pet dander, all the major grasses (includes hay), and all the major tree groups.

The dander is a tough one because she LOVES animals and would love a pet. However, that is not going to happen. Nathan's allergies to animals is even worse than hers. Emily did suggest that we get rid of Nathan so she could get a pet. Wasn't that kind of her?

What does this mean? Nothing more than we've already been doing to keep her allergies under control. The doctor did suggest Singular to help her through the spring & early summer and to keep her asthma under control. She did not want to do allergy shots though because she felt we were doing a good job of keeping her stable.

We are still waiting on the food allergies and we are hoping that she is outgrowing the eggs and dairy allergies but we'll see. In the meantime, we read labels and are careful.

Anyway, that's our life of living with allergies!