I NEVER in a million years anticipated ever making a blog post about this subject matter, nor do I consider myself an expert on the topic as I'm still learning the ins and outs of our new reality. As glazed over in my last post, we discovered that our son suffered from food intolerance around the age of 4-5 weeks old. It started out as frequent stools & a horrendous diaper rash; however, it slowly progressed to mucus & blood tinged stools. His PED recommended that I cut dairy and that it could take up to 21 days for the dairy to clear my system.
WELL I did that.
And there was no improvement. He STILL had blood tinged stools and mucus, so I started to take in a food journal and wrote literally EVERYTHING I ate down. The difficult thing about this was that I combo feed between breastfeeding and bottle feeding expressed breastmilk since little man had to go to daycare once I returned back to work(something I wasn't really thrilled with dealing with all of this). I will say that once the dairy cleared both of our systems, the eczema & diaper rashes stopped, but the thing that we struggled with was the mucus and blood in the stools still(and honestly as I'm writing this post we're still dealing with it.)
It's FRUSTRATING.
The amount of contradicting information on non-IGE mediated allergies is baffling and family's going through this don't know how to get their baby better! Sure, there are support groups and they are GREAT, but a lot of kiddos that have these non-IGE mediated allergies have more than one thing that is plaguing their poor little GI's.
So what do you do?
Stop breastfeeding and switch to a hypoallergenic formula?
Let me preface this by saying there is absolutely no way shape or form that I am anti-formula; however, I really do enjoy breastfeeding and something in my gut is telling me to push through. Fortunately for me his care team is incredibly supportive and gave me the referral to GI that I desperately wanted. After speaking with him, his only concern was his slow weight gain and would only recommend formula if we couldn't get his weight to go back up(which we had just gotten over a stomach virus the week prior and since then he is trending upwards).
In addition to this, I have also made a friend that I discovered through a local mom group on Facebook who went through the same thing I did with her daughter. She has been an incredible breath of fresh air and a tremendous support to me through late night conversations, crying through every slip and even the occasional(okay frequent) diaper pictures I've shared with her. She even led me to what is called muscle response testing, which could totally be a placebo; however, it's currently working on pinpointing his non-ige allergies so if it works it works!
So currently we know dairy for certain is an allergy, with the theories of peanuts & wheat. I'm currently top 9 out of my diet, which pretty much leaves just meat, fruits & vegetables in my diet. Once I get him to baseline I do plan on trialing eggs and rice(not instant) because he appeared to have tested okay for those; however, I'm not about to add things back into my diet prematurely. I will say I'm a heckova closer to getting him to baseline than I was 4 months ago and I will have to say I have Laurie to thank for that.
I've learned SO much in the past four months than I ever dreamed of and I know I have A LOT more to navigate through as we make it through the next year. My goal is to continue breastfeeding him up to a year with the hopes of being able to hit 18-24 months if we start outgrowing these intolerances. I will say that dairy has probably been the easiest out of the top 9 to avoid, since living in an AG state soy is literally in EVERYTHING and wheat is so hard to avoid. Not to mention canola oil tends to trigger him as well.
All I can say is my heart goes out to these kiddos that have IGE-mediated allergies or anyone who suffers through allergies/food intolerances. Eating out is virtually impossible, holidays seem like a nightmare(I'm currently planning an allergen friendly Thanksgiving...talk about OOF, but I'll be sure to share how successful/unsuccessful it was! ) and getting everyone on the same page is nearly impossible. It's been a struggle, but deep down in my heart I know I'm still doing the right thing by him.
He's growing, he's happy and who knows in a few months time I may look back and be like "Huh, that seems like a lifetime ago!"
Do I miss pizza? Macaroni and cheese and Chinese food? Heck yes I do! Though Laurie gave me some sage advice "Try focusing on the food you CAN eat and not the food you CAN'T eat' and it has saved me some sanity.
That being said...I'm already planning my feast I'm going to gorge myself on.
Long story short, if you are currently going through this know that you are not alone and I'm a firm believer that we're going to see an uptick of these non-IGE mediated allergies in the next few years with our processed food sources here in the USA. If anything, this experienced has humbled me, made me more empathetic and has opened my eyes to the amount of garbage that is in our food sources here in the United States. I've gotten really good at reading labels, learning a lot of the derivative names for allergens and basically navigating this journey the best I can.
Until next time.
-xoxo Midwest Mommie
1. Have you ever heard of non-IGE mediated allergies?
2. Any good Dairy,Wheat, Nut, Soy Gluten or Egg free recipes you'd like to share?
3. What is ONE food you'd be so sad to give up?
Post a Comment