Allergic Shiners

I wasn't planning to go in this direction so soon, but Walker gave me such a great opening this weekend I had to take it.

About a month ago, I took Walker (who is almost 15 mos) to the doctor with his third respiratory infection in the last 6 months. (Man, how many prepositional phrases can I get into one sentence? Jeez!) We had a chat about the likelihood that he may be developing asthma, how an increase in the histamine response in his gut (due to untreated food allergies) could increase his histamine response elsewhere, like in his lungs.

That was the final straw. I had been resisting the idea that he was food allergic, but this conversation, combined with the all-day crank-a-thon that had been our lives for several months, continual runny bowel movements, and poor eating just pushed me over the edge. We took him off dairy and became more vigilant about abstaining from gluten. Within a week, the daylong “waaahhhh” that had been grating on me all day every day for months had stopped. He’s eating more and stopped gagging on his food (which he had been doing several times per day). What an improvement!

This picture doesn’t quite do justice to what his face looked like Saturday morning, as though someone punched him in both eyes. No, nobody’s hitting kids around here. That’s what he looks like after the aforementioned junk food eating extravaganza. And he only had little bites of stuff here and there! This is one of the amazing blessings about having food-allergic children: their sensitive bodies so easily betray that which is malfunctioning inside of them.