As a somewhat overprotective, cautious Mommy, I decided to drive A to the hospital parking lot and give him his first sampling of peanut butter. Did A have any other allergies or any reason for me to think he'd have a reaction? No. But I just had a funny feeling I can't explain.
I packed up some pb and crackers and off we drive the 30 minutes to the nearest hospital emergency room drop off. While still sitting in the car and he in his car seat I decided to do the test. He's a picky eater, always has been so when I gave it to him, it was no surprise he batted it away. I thought, I'm not driving all the way here for you to at least not TRY it. So I put a tiny dollop on my finger and smeared a bit on his lip. A few seconds later he just starts crying. I turn around to pull the car out into the street and his crying became like nothing I'd ever heard from him before. He was screaming. I quickly turned around and his face had swollen up.
Panicked, I turned the car back around and drove the 20 seconds back to the ER drop off.
The doctors tried to explain to me that the fact that he was crying was good. He was breathing. I've never been more petrified in my life. This was just a smidgen on his lip. What if he had swallowed some of it. Well, obviously, we were there at the ER. Seeing my son go through that, having them try numerous times to get an I.V. in without success while he's screaming his little heart out, just watching him not understand why this was happening to him, just broke my heart.
That was just over a year ago and now we are a full fledged, peanut/tree nut allergy free household and it has certainly been a journey. I've created this blog with a little bit of catharsis for me, support for others going through the same thing, and maybe a tiny bit of educating people, who say and obliviously think things like this, "well, if there's peanuts in there, we'll find out soon enough." For the record, that's not how we find out if there's peanuts in there. We scrutinize the label and if we're dining out and if in doubt, we don't eat! Sometimes epi pens don't work or aren't enough!!
Ok, that's off my chest. Well there's a few more things that I have to get off my chest too. But I'll save that for another day.
