Allergy Season

Ladies and gentleman, it is a new dawn and a new day!  Just this last we week, we FINALLY wrapped up four children's worth of allergy testing out our new allergist in our "new" (even though we've been here a year and a half) city.  Don't even get me started on how much torture it was for ME to have to sit through 8 hours worth of appointments between the 4 children, followed up with two separate trips to LabCorp for blood work to be drawn.  As it was, it was plenty torturous for them as well.

Unrelated to the post, but it IS a picture of all four of them.

It's been at least 3 years since they've done any testing and -- since we were getting ourselves established as new patients with the doctor here -- we thought it was time to check things out and see where we're at.  And SURPRISE guys!!!!!!  Sophie has actually outgrown some allergies!  Hahaha.  Quite shocking, I know.  Turns out allergy girl had no reaction to dairy on her skin prick test, and her  IgE levels were less than 1 for both dairy AND egg whites!  I legitimately did not think this day would ever come.

The doctor said we could set up appointments for an in-office food challenge whenever we were ready, but Grace and Sophie had other plans.  On Saturday, while Scott and I were gone all day with the younger three (and Ethan was at work) the girls obviously had to come up with SOMETHING fun to do while we were all gone.  {That was heavy with sarcasm, in case you couldn't tell.}  That something fun turned out to be their own version of a food challenge.  I tell you, teenagers do the dumbest things.  Over the course of their experimentation, Sophie tried ice cream, cheese, and real butter on popcorn.  She thought the cheese was gross, but the other two seemed to hit the spot.  They stopped short of trying her on anything with eggs in it, though, and for that I was grateful.  As it was, I was plenty mad at them for attempting something like that while there was neither a parent nor a doctor present.  Grace assured me that they would have had it covered, though, because the epipen and Benadryl were both at the ready.  {Insert eye roll.}

All's well that ends well, I guess, so it's kind of exciting to announce that Sophie is no longer allergic to milk!  I think I'll have them hold off with the egg challenge until we make it to the doctor's office, but it's kind of surreal to think that she has two new food categories to draw from.  She IS still allergic to peanuts and tree nuts (along with coconut and sunflower seeds), but that's relatively easy to manage and avoid.

(That ginormous one on the bottom right is her reaction to pistachio.)

As for the other three, peanuts are still a no go -- and tree nuts for Alex and Isaac are as well -- but Jane has been elated to finally try Nutella after her skin prick test showed no reaction to hazelnuts and the doctor gave her the go-ahead.  We're still waiting on her lab results to come back {for some reason, when I took the four of them for their blood work, they only tested her for macadamia nuts and not for anything else, so I had to bring her back in several days later}, so we'll see how the other tree nuts will fare for her.

 Jane tested positive for a bunch of environmental allergens as well.  So much so, in fact, that we're going to start her on allergy shots.  With her asthma so heavily affected by seasonal allergies, I really hope the shots will lessen the severity.  Hashtag fingers crossed.

 Alex has a ton of seasonal allergies as well, but they don't seem to incapacitate him as much as Jane.

Meanwhile, as of right now, Isaac has NO seasonal allergies!

All in all, this has been one exciting round of allergy testing!  Hahahaha.  Although, the record should also note that they all absolutely hated every second of it.  Especially Isaac.  The poor little lamb was traumatized first with the full panels of skin prick testing and then with having his blood drawn.  I think he'll be happy to know that he probably won't have to do this again for a very long time.  :)