Seven Children - Nineteen Food Allergies

Another day, another food allergy. This is my life, complete with eight epi-pens. I live in fear of bringing new foods into the house because I never know if one of my children is going to have an allergic reaction to something. I never thought that I would be walking through the grocery store looking for food to feed my family that won't kill someone or land someone in the hospital.

Often people have asked me "How do you do it?" The simple answer is all allergens are banned from the house. My seven year old not only has food allergies but he is also autistic. That adds an element all itself. If there is a food in the house that has a known allergen in it, there is a good chance it will get strung through the house. Worse yet, it will be one of his allergens and he will eat it. Dealing with a seven year old autistic boy who is having an allergic reaction is the stuff nightmares are made out of. I would rather wrestle crocodiles. The children have adjusted well to a limited diet. They can either do without something they like to eat or they can sit in the waiting room at the emergency room for up to six hours. Experience has taught them that one, sitting in the hospital waiting is no fun and two, watching one of your siblings almost die from anaphylaxis is scary.

When we started this adventure into the world of potentially killer food, our pediatrician told me that the two worst times for allergies to show up were puberty and menopause. I have seven children and just as we had adjusted to what we could not eat my two youngest daughters decided it was time to start their journey into puberty. In the course of a week five more foods were removed from the family diet due to allergic reactions. The list now includes somewhere around nineteen foods. Picture a family with seven children that includes nineteen food allergies. That doesn't seem so bad until you realize that three of those foods are wheat/gluten, tomatoes and corn. That means no breads or pastas, anything that contains high fructose corn syrup or corn flour and almost anything prepackaged where the ingredients read "spices". This isn't even getting into contact allergies to things like household cleaners and beauty products. Ninety percent of the grocery store is a danger to my family.

I have learned more about food than I ever wanted to know since food allergies. Until I had to start reading food labels I had no idea how many pre-packaged and/or processed foods contained high fructose corn syrup. Wheat and corn flour are used as anti-caking agents in almost as many foods.

Current food labeling laws make things a bit easier. The most common eight allergens; fish, shellfish, wheat, eggs, soy, peanuts, tree nuts and milk, have to be listed in plain English and in bold print on food labels. Milk can no longer be listed as casein and eggs whites can no longer be listed as albumin. It was hard enough teaching my kids and husband to read food labels. It was harder teaching alternate names for things like milk and eggs. For the longest time I was afraid to send my husband to the store because of his short term memory loss. I would tell him to bring home X brand of whatever we needed. At the store logic would take over and he pick up whatever was on sale to save money thinking he was doing us a favor. That favor could have landed us a trip to the hospital. At least with the money that he saved on groceries we could pay the hospital co-pay.

This past week, after discovering another food allergy and reading up on it, I really have to wonder if the human race isn't bringing some of these allergies on itself.

Anyone that has ever had to deal with food allergies knows that you can eat something a hundred times with no reaction, but that hundred and first time can cause a reaction. Not only have I become used to this in my house, I almost expect it. It's why I wasn't surprised when eating a piece of bell pepper, a very common food in my house, sent one of my children into an allergic fit.

The day prior we discovered that at least two more people in the house could no longer drink Gatoraide, at least red Gatoraide, because of the red coloring put into it. Originally we only had to worry about the high fructose corn syrup in it, now we have to worry about food colorings.

After what will forever be known as "The Gatoraide Incident" I was curious how common bell pepper allergy was. Some time on Google and I had more information to add to my growing list of odd food facts that could save a life. Bell peppers are actually quite interesting.

I know I have never thought twice about what kind of bell peppers I am buying in the store beyond what color I want. Much like tomatoes there are various strains or hybrids of peppers created by cross-pollination, genetic altering and so forth. Where I won't risk bringing another pepper into the house, I did find this information quite fascinating. You can be allergic to one strain of pepper but not another.

There are a number of proteins and enzymes in a pepper that can cause an allergic reaction; capsicum, the stuff that makes hot peppers hot, is found in all peppers in some amount, profilin, Bet V1 and protein P23. Each one of these things is found in different amounts, and sometimes not at all, in various peppers, depending on the strain. Depending on which component the allergy is to this means that theoretically you could put a dozen peppers that look identical to each other but gotten from different sources in front of someone and they may not react to a single one of the peppers, they may react to two or three of them, or all of them. This means either becoming an expert on pepper genetics and hoping that your local grocery store can tell you what strain they have in that day or avoiding them all together. Personally, I am not going to trust the grocery store.

Pepper allergy also means more potential problems that we now have to look out for including latex allergy and cross-reactivity with other nightshade vegetables such as tomatoes (a known allergy in my house), eggplant, potatoes, and tobacco.

Yes, my life just became more interesting.

When the first of my children turned up allergic to a number of foods there was a number of things I was never told that I either learned on my own by research or experience or I learned from other parents who had been living with food allergies longer than I have.

~ I was never told about cross-reactivity. For example if someone has a peanut allergy you have to watch for reactions to other members of the legume family because there may or may not be another allergy or two there.

~ I remember asking the allergist about shellfish because every now and then you hear about someone who was sitting in a restaurant when the server walked by someone with an allergy with a steaming plate of shellfish and the allergic person went into anaphylaxis. I was told that never happens. The allergist was an idiot. It can and does happen.

~ I was never told to check any pet food for allergens. This almost cost my daughter her life because of dust that was in the air after feeding the cat. The cat food had shellfish in it and my daughter inhaled some of the dust and went into instant anaphylaxis.

~ Normally you are told to throw away a prescription a year after it's filled because it is no longer good. That isn't the case with epi-pens. I was never told to check on the epi-pen for the expiration date. This is never the same thing as one year past the date filled by date. Dey even has a spot on their website where you can register your epi-pen lot number and they will email you just before it expires as well as a lot of indispensable information on life threatening allergies and using an epi-pen for anyone that needs one.