The Princess and the Pea...nut

Oh the life of an FPIES mom. Believe it or not it feels a little strange having to ask people if you can vacuum their floor whenever you go to their house. I guess it wouldn’t be so strange if you were just trying to help out with their housework, but when your motivation is to make sure there are no crumbs of food hanging around – it almost seems like your spewing insults at them.
Yesterday we were next door at my brother’s house before heading out with his family. As usual we spent most of the short time there chasing after my little scavengers as they prowled around for little things to eat. Sure enough they both managed to find some tiny crumb to put in their mouths.

Our practice is so ask them to take it out, sweep the mouth, and offer some ice chips or a pacifier. Unless of course they have managed to chew it up and have surely already ingested some – then we let them enjoy themselves and keep our eyes open for a reaction. So far – 100% - we always get one.

Well the little man found what we thought was a Cherio and was munching away. I tried to sweep his mouth with no luck – this was a lock-jaw scenario! So off we went on our outing. Fifteen minutes later while walking around the college I realized that this little guy was still chewing on something. Shawn, Bethany and I all tried to get him to open his mouth – there was no way a Cherio would last that long without being total mush. Finally we were able to sweep his mouth to find…little bits of a honey roasted peanut. The little bits were all that was left!

Yikes! As you can imagine we were nervous about an immediate anaphylaxis (IgE) reaction - even though the twins don’t really have any IgE mediated allergies – BabyM is classically allergic to soy and BabyR to dust mites but that’s about it as far as we know. Still, we watched and waited for a little while. Thank God nothing happened. Well – nothing happened immediately.

After having gone to bed at 7:30 BabyR woke up screaming around 10:00. He was sitting up, holding onto one ear and was inconsolable. We checked his temperature which was a bit elevated and decided to give him some Tylenol. Alll I could think was “oh great not another ear infection.” This morning BabyR woke up early and fussed until I went in to get him – absolutely nothing unusual there. BabyM and I spent the morning with a fussy boy who had no interest in eating and who still had a low grade fever.

Just before nap time he decided to tell me exactly what was going on. For the first time since his last bit of goat cheese a week or so ago, BabyR had a stool marked with a good bit of mucous.

Ok – no infection, just another positive FPIES reaction. I have never noted fever as a food ingestion symptom before, but after a quick google search and reading one of the medical studies – there it was. I guess this is probably one of the more extreme reactions so far – at least in terms of how quickly we saw the reaction.

I guess perhaps it goes without saying, but I’ll say it just the same – don’t be offended if I ask to vacuum your floor!