What Came First the Chicken or the Egg?

When my husband and I were researching in the beginning regarding the allergies we read that on rare occasions kids who were allergic to eggs could become allergic to chicken and that children allergic to milk could become allergic to beef.

About a month ago our son refused to eat any beef or chicken put before him. He used to love chicken soup and all of a sudden, or so it felt, he wouldn't swallow any of it. We recently had our little guy tested for more allergies by his new allergist. Everything in his diet was tested, in an attempt to find the root of our son's vomiting and such. Unfortunately, we didn't find that answer but along the way we got a confirmation that the reason he was refusing those foods was because he was allergic to beef and chicken as well as turkey. Our little man was one of those rare cases who's allergies to both milk and eggs led him to be allergic to the animals that produced them.

The bright side of it is that he doesn't have the same anaphylactic reactions.

What to Do Without Eggs

The bad thing about having an egg allergy is that it is in so many things. The great thing is you get a lot of home cooked meals and home baked goods. At least in this house that's the way it's worked.

I've learned since we found out about my son's egg allergies ways in which to substitute for eggs. There are many options out there however, I've gotten by on just a few honestly.

For baking and cooking I usually use Ener-G Eggs. This is a powder found in places like Whole Foods or Vitamin Cottage. You can use it in recipes as an egg, egg yolk, or egg white for baking purposes. However, it cannot be used to make an egg dish. Although it can be used to make French Toast. We just use the Ener-g Egg as a direct substitute in our French Toast recipes!

For baking cakes and cake like breads such as banana bread I use 1/4 cup applesauce for every egg I replace. This works really great. You can also use a whole banana, 1/4 cup squash or other puree of your choice which fits the test of your recipe better.

I've been told that there are other ways as well such as 2 Tbsp. water + 1 Tbsp. oil + 2 tsp. baking powder. I've never used this way all though I have added water and oil to recipes that I've used Ener-G eggs. I've done it all by feel however, because I know what my breads should feel like.

The one thing I was having a hard time figuring out was how to glaze my breads. Recently, I've learned that you can take 1/4 cup milk (I use Rice Milk) and 2 tablespoons sugar. You place this on the stove until the sugar dissolves and the mixture has boiled for 2-3 minutes. Then on a freshly baked bread just taken out of the oven you brush the glaze on and you have a beautiful glazed bread.

Lastly, for egg salads and scrambled eggs we use Tofu. It works really well and on Post Punked Kitchen you can find some nice recipes.

We've found that cooking without eggs is quite easy and that we get the bonus that we can eat raw and under cooked dough!

Thinking It's Usually Milk

Because my son's first reactions were milk and because he is such a little guy we usually assume that a reaction was caused by milk. When we used to go to places were a lot of kids played we would see them all carrying around their little sippy cups. Therefore, if he got a reaction we figured it was just from the milk that kids were dripping everywhere. Everywhere of course being not so much in terms of cleaning but for a child with severe milk allergies it is a lot.

He has had some reactions to egg I'm assuming through my breast milk and at a restaurant before we really stopped going. However, the vast majority of his reaction was caused by milk from other children trailing their drinks around with them and then my son gumming everything everywhere like all babies do. We're hoping and realize in the back of our heads that as he gets older and stops sticking his hands on everything and then putting them in his mouth that his reactions won't happen as often.

FAAN How to Read a Label Cards

The Food Allergy and Anaphylaxsis Network (FAAN) sells How To Read A Label Cards. They sell them in these nice credit card sizes so you can put them in your wallet and they also come in magnets that you can put on your refrigerator to help in the Kitchen.

As soon as we saw these my husband and bought 4 copies of the Egg-free diet and the Milk-free diet ones as well as a pair for the fridge. We gave one set to my mother one to my father and then we each took a set for us. We are the 4 safe people that our son can take food from.

I was very excited about the labels, however, when we received the Egg-free diet one we noticed there were certain things that where not on the FAAN card that were on the list given to us by our allergist.

I took out a sharpie and added to all of them the following:

• Apovitellin
• Globulin
• Livetin
• Ovalbumin
• Ovomucin
• Ovomucoid

If you get the Egg-Free cards I would recommend adding them to the list.

To order go to www.foodallergy.org

• Simplesse

Please Don't Touch My Son

We've been told by my son's doctors that the severity of his reactions and the fact that he reacts to such trace amounts of the allergens is rare. To us it's the only way we've been aquainted with egg and milk allergies. Therefore, we naturally think of all the ways that trace amounts can find their way to our son's body and more specifically his mouth.

Like any parent of a baby knows, strangers always come up to touch babies. Whether they are giving them pats on the shoulder or touseling their hair people are always trying to show open effection to babies they don't even know. I used to think it was a weird quirk that strangers would come up to me and start touching my child...now I find it annoying and rude that they don't ask first.

In the beginning my husband and I didn't know how to deal with people touching him; should we say something, should we allow them to touch him and hold our tongues, should we ask if they've had anything with milk or eggs today? Eventually, we agreed that asking somebody if they had contact with milk or eggs was the best way to handle it. Of course we had to be quick on our toes and preemptively ask faster then they could reach out and pinch his cheeks. We've found that in general this works because people ask us why and usually after we explain that our son has a life threatening allergy most people either stop in their tracks and don't touch him or explain that they haven't had any of those things. The later group tend to continue their unwelcome touching. I honestly am more comfortable with the strangers that just back away from him and give him a smile...at least I don't have to still worry. However, with the people who say yes and continue where they left off I wonder if they did have contact and just didn't know it. After all milk and eggs are in so many things that people don't even realize.

I guess for right now we will continue to use this method until we feel we've found something more effective. Until them I'm just waiting for the day when people don't have the instinct to engage in physical contact with my child.

I Couldn't Even See It!

Shortly after my son was diagnosed by allergies I went to a resturaunt with a friend for lunch. I thought that it wouldn't be a problem if I just wipe the area in front of him and put him in a high chair that I also would wipe down. I believed that my precautions would be enough to protect my child, after all he wasn't eating at the resturaunt. I gave him some cherrios to eat from a bowl I brought from home and I fed him some butternut squash, also from home, with one of his baby spoons. I really thought that I had things under control. After all he hadn't had a reaction in a week.

My false sense of my son's safety led me to find out how severe his allergies were. After leaving the resturaunt my son had hives around his mouth and was throwing up once more. It was painful to see my son once again in pain. However, it was also very frustrating. I had though that I had protected him well enough I wiped the area with a napkin and water and I had made sure that he didn't eat anything from the resturaunt. It didn't matter. Somehow a trace of dairy or egg on the seemingless clean table or high chair had caused my son to have a reaction.

About a week later my son was playing with a toy, in the car, that had been in the same resturaunt. All of a sudden he threw it across the car. At first I thought it might be his throw the toy so mommy has to pick it up game so I gave it back to him. However, he literally hurled it across the car again as soon as it touched his hands. 15 minutes later my son started throwing up and he had hives again around his mouth. Apparently the toy had been contaminated as well and I couldn't even see that there was anything on it. I am so grateful that my little man knows so quickly that he is allergic to something, this was not the first time he had rejected something with an allergen it.

Nonetheless, even with my gratitude I felt disheartened. How could I protect my son from allergies if I couldn't even see them?!

It's not Just Food!

After reading the books you'll find out that the list of things your child can't have doesn't just stop at food. The reality is that so many things that we use on a daily basis from cleaning detergents, shampoos, soaps, gels, perfumes, make-up, sun screen and more have either milk or eggs in it. Even things we don't encounter have them such has some medical gloves. A good rule of thumb I've learned is that anything that has an ingredients list needs to be checked for allergens.

The great thing is that a lot of companies are now clearly labeling products in plan English if they have an allergen. The bad thing of course is that these non-food items don't usually and a lot of food from outside the United States are also not clearly marked saying "this product contains: milk and eggs" or "this product may contain: milk or eggs" or "this product was produced on a equipment that manufactures products that contain: milk or eggs". Therefore, even if the allergen isn't listed I read the entire ingredients list including the active and inactive ones. If a company of a non-food product has only listed the active ingredients I tend to not buy the product unless I do more research on the web or by calling the company.

We've also learned that some products change and therefore, we can't trust that just because we bought it once that it's ok now. Also sometimes the companies make a mistake, if this happens the alerts you can get from the FAAN newsletter and online are really helpful. (http://www.foodallergy.org/)

When it comes to my sons allergies I've learned to not trust what I knew to be true of the ingredients and to always ask questions.

A List of Questions for the Doctor

Like any parent of a child with a diagnosed medical condition I had a lot of questions. Truth be told I still have a lot of questions. Every time I go to the doctor, which is quite often probably every six weeks or less at this point, I have more questions for the doctor. I've found making lists the best way for me to deal with my never ending well of questions and concerns.

Some of the questions on my first list:

1. When should we administer the Epipen Jr.?
2. What should we do after we give it to him?
3. Can we give more than one dose?
4. How many should we carry on us?
5. When should we just give Benadryl?
6. When will he grow out of his allergies?
7. What are the chances he will grow out of them?
8. Is he allergic to anything else?
9. How do we know what has milk and eggs in it?
10. Are there any resources for parents?
11. Are there any support groups out there?
12. When I have another child will I need to eat differently in order to breastfeed?
13. What are the chances that other children we have will have these allergies?
14. Should we switch to soy formula?

The next time we went to the doctor we began understanding the severity of my sons reactions and therefore we had even more questions.

They were:

1. Are there medications out there that can help him on a daily basis so he doesn't have so many reactions?
2. Does he also have environmental allergies? (At this point he was showing signs he did.)
3. Is it normal to have so many reactions even when we are so careful?
4. How often can he be given Benadryl?
5. Can we preemptively give him Benadryl before we go to places were there is a strong likelihood he could get a reaction?
6. Is Purell enough remove traces of the allergens if we don't have soap or water?
7. Is mouth wash enough to remove them from our mouths?
8. Will the eczema issues continue?
9. What activities can he participate in?
10. Can he attend preschool?
11. Can we go on vacation?

These are just a few of the many questions that have confronted us since discovering his allergies. For many of them we haven't received answers from the doctors but rather we found out ourselves through trial and error what worked and what didn't. The ones that didn't were especially upsetting for me because I had to see my son go through yet another reaction. However, we've learned a lot in the process and have discovered ways to cope with many situations. My biggest lesson has been that we need to be flexible and creative.

Scouring the Books

After leaving the allergists I had a prescription for an Epipen Jr. in one hand and a folder in the other. The folder contained a page on each of his allergies and a name of one and only one organization: The Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN). That's it. My son was just diagnosed positively with life threatening allergies to the point that we have to carry around an injection of life saving medication and we got a folder.

I was excited of course to check out the network and although it's really useful for many things, more on that later, the reality is that for a parent that just found out about the allergy it leaves much to be desired. I wanted information: what is the likelihood he would out grow his allergies, what are the chances of him getting other ones, what support groups are out there, what do I feed him, are there any good recipe books out there, what research is being done, how did other people cope, and most important how did it effect our daily lives and my sons childhood?

My husband and I started at the library and just read book after book on allergies. Most of them are general to all food allergies and spend honestly more time usually on peanuts and wheat. I found the egg and milk sections lacking and honestly looking back not so useful for helping me adjust my life and learn what I needed to to protect my son. I did learn somethings of course such as how much stuff in our house and in other places contain eggs and milk. Nonetheless, I felt almost more helpless after reading many of the books. This is not to say that I wouldn't read them all again and I would recommend to check them out. At the bottom of this post I have included a list of books out their on the subject.

I also began to read a lot of recipe books because having a son with these allergies means that almost every restaurant would be off limits to him as well as many already made or almost made foods. For me I didn't find these books as useful as I'm really attached to my recipes and I found that many of the foods weren't what we usually ate. Food is big in our family and I wanted my son to experience the same foods I had as a child and adult. Nonetheless, these books can be very helpful to many families. I've also included a list of cookbooks below. In addition there is a great link to the Post Punk Kitchen which has great vegan recipes for faux eggs and other great ideas. In the future I will be posting my own recipes that I've converted to be both dairy and egg free.

Books

Cookbooks

These are a great place to start. For more suggestions check out the FAAN website www.foodallergy.org, check out your local library, or visit www.amazon.com.

Sometimes the Doctors Don't Know

In the middle of January of this year my son was diagnosed with both milk and egg allergies. However, that simple statement wasn't so simple to come by for my family and my then 8 month old son. Finding out that my son had allergies was a long process that began before we even suspected that he had any. Around the time that my son was 5 months old he stopped gaining weight. At first his doctor wasn't concerned, after all he was born at 10 Ibs. and both my husband and I are pretty average in stature in addition when I was 6 months old I too stopped gaining weight. The doctor told us to just monitor him and wait...so we did.
As we waited our son continued showing signs that he wasn't growing. I was breastfeeding at the time that all of this was occurring and we spoke to the doctor also about our feelings that our son wasn't drinking enough and that he wasn't interested in drinking water or formula to supplement his liquids. The doctor recommended that we supplement him with yogurt. This was around Thanksgiving and we visited my brother for the holiday. While we were gone we noticed our son wasn't feeling so well, however, we weren't in our environment so we thought he was just having a hard time adjusting to the new place. About four days after he started eating the yogurt and a few days into our trip 2 very hellish months began when he began projectile vomiting. We called our doctor who suggested we see our nephew's doctor in the area. We asked this doctor if our son had an allergy and we were informed that it wasn't related to the yogurt at all and that he just had a virus. This diagnosis was later confirmed by our doctor when we returned home for our vacation.
This was the beginning of the "virus" period. We went to one doctors appointment after the other: including a Gastrointestinal pediatric specialist. We were told that our son had a virus that could last up to 4 months and that his stomach had probably been partially paralyzed. This was the explanation for our son's continued vomiting. It also led the doctor to prescribe our son prevacid. In the meantime our son was no longer just not gaining weight but he was losing it. The worst point was when he lost a pound in a month and went below the growth charts. We began going to the doctor just to weigh him. I felt desperate to find out what was going on with my son. I still was suspicious that he had an allergy to milk because he wouldn't eat any plain cheeses or pasta with cheese and he refused to eat the yogurts. Nonetheless, the doctors still thought that he didn't have any allergies.
Around the beginning of the new year I realized that my milk had dried up and that he needed formula. Unfortunately, he didn't want to drink the formula. We thought it was the type of bottle we were using so we tried different ones, then we thought it was the type of formula, we even tasted them thinking that maybe it was the taste, so we went from Enfamil to Simlac (it tasted better). He still wouldn't drink it though. After 2 days of not drinking anything he finally drank 8 oz. of formula.
I put him down for a nap. When he woke up an hour later his face was completely swollen to the point that we couldn't see his inch long eyelashes. His face was covered in hives. When I unzipped his pajamas he had hives everywhere and his entire body was also swollen, his stomach was three times its normal size. He was also sneezing and coughing a bit. We called the doctor who told us to give him benadryl and just have him come in to the office in the morning. Now we know whe should have rushed him to the ER.

The doctors finally agreed that my son had a milk allergy. Thus, we were sent to the allergist to do scratch tests which is how we found out that he also had allergies to eggs too.
Unfortunately, things didn't get easier just because we had a diagnosis. This blog is meant to be for all those parents who just found out about their child's allergies or who have known it for a while. It is for those parents who would like support and to know that they aren't going through this whole experience alone.