We found out that our child had an allergy to dairy when he was about 4 months old. Thankfully, I was breastfeeding him, so it was an easy fix. I just cut it out of my diet. But, it didn’t really fix things. He was ALWAYS sick.
He had chronic intestinal problems. He had some scary respiratory problems. He had asthma and sleep apnea. He had pneumonia twice. He had bronchitis so many times, that I lost count. I don’t think I slept more that 4 hours at a time the first two years of his life. His teeth were a mess, he had to have oral surgery before the age of two.
The doctors kept diagnosing and ‘treating’ the symptoms, but nothing helped. I really felt that he had food allergies and began cutting out foods. He never had dairy, but then I moved on to Soy and Gluten. Cutting those out helped, but he was still sick. We went to see an allergist and had the testing done, without the referral from our pediatrician. We tested 23 things. The only thing he had no reaction to, was oddly enough, pineapple.
We’re doing sublingual immunotherapy in the hopes that someday he will be able to lead a more normal life. After cutting out all of the allergens we spend about $1000 a month on food, but we have a healthy child, and that makes it totally worth it.
Thank you for sharing your food allergy story. Has anyone else had experience with sublingual immunotherapy?
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I did that as a kid- probably from around 6 till I as a teenager. I think it might have helped some while I was doing it, but once I stopped, I still had allergies. I have since changed my eating habits and worked at improving my intestinal flora, which has improved my allergies a lot. All of my allergies as a child where environmental allergies, none where to food (I now have an anaphylactic reaction to pine nuts and other pine related products, but that didn’t become an issue till I was in my twenties).