Our son was 13 months when he was diagnosed with his first allergy. I fed him mashed peas and he started coughing, then choking a bit and developing hives. His coughing was persistent and he started vomiting as well. It was really scary and I remember feeling helpless. I called 911 and was alone at the time. Before that incident, our son had vomited regularly after eating some foods and we attributed it to reflux. He also had terrible eczema and we just thought he had overly sensitive skin. After an upper GI and swallow study, a few different medications and other specialists evaluating his immunology responses, we finally looked at food allergies as a test. It felt like the most non-linear maze until we got to the pea reaction…and then we followed up with blood work and a skin scratch test. The tests confirmed that our son was anaphylactic to peanuts, most tree nuts, eggs, most legumes (including peas), mustard, sesame and soy protein. He is currently 10.5 years old as of 2022 and has not outgrown any of his food allergens yet.
Once diagnosed, we found FARE, Kids with Food Allergies and FAACT to be the most informative and helpful for creating allergy plans, what to include in an allergy bag and how to understand the basics (reading labels, understanding and preventing cross-contact, and understanding emergency signs and symptoms of a reaction). For every day living, I found several blogs with tips and tricks, recipes and people steps ahead on the journey who could detail tools for navigating this forward-facing health condition! Each meal requires careful planning and we had to reorient our thinking to anchor our plans in safety while also having fun. I was also finding that the Facebook groups brought together families out of trauma (after reactions) and fears (of future reactions) and as a caregiver I didn’t want to raise my kids with extra anxiety. I ended up creating Feedyourcan.com (when some foods you just can’t) as an empowering way to use the struggle as the teacher to help our kids build lasting life skills that will serve them well in food AND non-food challenging situations.