Fire Drill

I was awakened at 4 am on Wednesday morning by Boy #1 at my bedside complaining of a stomach ache. In my haze I rushed him into the bathroom thinking that we were going to have a second sighting of dinner. We didn't thankfully, but he was in our bed for the remainder of the sleeping hours.
When the time came for us to leave for school I had convinced him to give school a shot. His class was doing a project that I had planned on going in to help with and promised him we could come home if he still didn't feel well.

I joined the class about 30 minutes later and listened to the instructions for their project. #1 seemed fine, if a little tired until I got a little closer to him. He was scratching at his neck, and not suspecting anything, I glanced at his neck. He had a rash that he thought was bug bites. Um, that would be no. A bright red rash was all over his torso in addition to his neck, and what I didn't know then was that it was creeping downward into his groin area as well.

As soon as he had finished his project we left the school and called the doctor. I called Headless Dad to let him know what was up and he was the one that remembered what we had for dinner the night before: shrimp and scallops. While we've had shrimp before, we don't typically have scallops and they were mixed in with the pasta. #1 didn't eat any but apparently the damage was done. Thank goodness he didn't actually eat them!

A dose of Benadryl and an hour later we were in the doctor's office, (God, I love our pediatrician!), left with a prescription for prednizone and an epi-pen, and then off to get a blood allergy panel. Of course, that didn't go well either, with him getting dizzy and pale after they took his blood.

Amazingly, that was the worst of it. (Unless you count the sticker shock of the epi-pen. Holy cow! I knew they were expensive, but even with insurance it was waaay more than I expected.) #1 felt better through the evening and was completely clear by the next morning. While we're still waiting on the allergy panel and then the referral to the allergist, we're fairly certain that it was only the scallops, which are pretty easy to avoid.

One mistake I made in all of this was to tell him more than he could handle. He's a smart kid, and I thought that he would be able to understand everything. Oops. By bedtime he was in tears thinking that he was going to die or something. While, yes, food allergies can be scary and dangerous, we are lucky to have good insurance, a fantastic doctor, and I have good friends that I can call on with questions when we get all of the tests back. I will be diligent, yes, but no, it's not the end of the world. Millions of people live with food allergies every day and if it's more or worse than what I suspect then we'll deal with it.

The prednizone though? It's of the devil.