The Twinkies

If you happen to be a child who cannot have milk, eggs or gluten you get a vegan, gluten-free, imported, organic dark chocolate Easter bunny.

At 2.

Eggs. And barely at that.

That’s what Fiona’s allergic to. Eggs. That is the only protein she is at all sensitive too. Only one.

Well, and milk. Not casein, which is the protein in milk, but lactose apparently. At any rate, obvious circumstantial evidence suggests that given dairy this child has GI distress. If it isn’t casein…

So we are cutting all dairy, cow, goat and sheep, out of her diet based on the “give her milk and she poops water” evidence and all eggs based on the blood test and hoping that helps.

I was hoping for something laden with a little more hope for a solution. She isn’t exactly eating a lot of eggs or dairy NOW. Bits of bits in bread is about it. We’re going back in 4 weeks to follow up.

As you know, F has had a long history of GI issues. Last April we got a list of foods to avoid from some admittedly woo-woo seeming testing but but it did work and the diarrhea went away. We reintroduced the problem foods one at a time and, other than milk, everything seemed OK. Then, over the summer, her diarrhea came back and hasn’t gone away since.

I took her to the pediatrician who offered the stellar advice of “some toddlers just have runny stools” but did test for parasites (negative) and gave me a slip for a blood draw.

The blood draw was hellacious. The phlebotomist didn’t have any skill with kids or compassion and dug around in both arms trying to find a vein. It was… horrible.

We put her back, rather half-heartedly, on the elimination diet. It is very hard to eliminate all cow dairy, corn, yeast, tomatoes, eggs, mangoes and strawberries from your diet and I end up feeling like the evil harpy constantly telling people (again, because they didn’t listen the first 5 times) that she can’t eat what you just fed her. Did you read the label? Did you just add milk to that?

On a side note I am really tired of how no one seems to be willing to take this seriously or believe me that food is an issue. It may not be the underlying problem but some foods CLEARLY aggravate the symptoms and I don’t understand why I have to be the food police while everyone else is free to forget and take her out for cheesecake, ketchup and eggs. And then I get to deal with the sobbing child whose burned by her own excrement.

At any rate, we took her to yet another doctor last week who took an full history, starting with the antibiotics at her birth, and her take was that elimination and challenge was giving us confusing results so let’s do a finger prick test to check for common allergens.

That’s right, not 3 VIALS of blood, a finger prick.

We’ll have a follow-up appt. next week to go over the results and see where to go from here.

I think turkey is a migraine trigger for me.

I love this song. I went to college with the musician and she was the person who let me know that dark chocolate has no milk. This information about dark chocolate became very useful recently when F and I were on that elimination diet. We’re off it now. She’s all better. Anyway, when I spent a summer in Toronto studying Latin with a remarkably gorgeous TA, living through a heat wave with no air conditioning and eating too many mango salads I had it set on my laptop as my alarm so I woke up to it every day.

Just a random thing. You can buy the album, by the way. It’s good.