Eggs, and Preschools, and Birthday Parties, Oh My!

There's quite possibly nothing more boring to read than blogging about blogging, but please bear with me for a moment. The problem with this blog is that I don't get around to posting my occasional post-worthy allergy thoughts, so they accumulate. After time passes, none seem important enough to post, or maybe they do, but then it's too daunting to write them all up, or I worry that it will all come across like I'm allergy obsessed because suddenly I have 6 allergy posts in 6 days? I don't know - clearly I'm over thinking all of this and just making excuses for what boils down to procrastination, so with no further ado, here is a dumping of some of these accumulated thoughts, boiled down as best as I can get them:

FAQ: How is the introduction of baked egg going?
Short answer is that it's going great - Georgia's been tolerating homemade baked goods without any reactions. Longer answer is that, as exciting as it was to be able to get started on introducing eggs to her diet, we've fallen off course in terms of following the doctor's protocol for introducing more and more egg. We haven't yet jumped on to the pancake step, because how am I supposed to think of recipes for getting her up to 1/4 of an egg per serving in her tummy three times a day? No, really -- that was a serious question -- does anyone have any suggestions? A serving of cornbread really only has about 1/8th of an egg at most, so I'd have to double the portion size and serve it at breakfast lunch and dinner to get us there. With cupcakes, I'd have to give her even MORE, because each cupcake would have less egg. I'm about ready to say screw it, things have been going fine, let's move on and try the pancakes.

FAQ: What is the rationale behind the introduction of baked egg? Is the idea that she is building up a tolerance to eggs?
Good question, but no, it's not about building up a tolerance to eggs. My lay person's way of explaining this is that baking the eggs at a high temperature ever so slightly changes the shape of the protein that she's allergic to, just enough that when she eats it her body no longer recognizes it as an allergen (i.e., her immune system stops treating the food in question as a dangerous invader that it needs to fight). I'll post a link to the relevant study sometime.

Ugh. Preschool.
Georgia will be old enough to attend in the fall. Aside from anxiety I have about taking that next step of having to trust Georgia and a bunch of other people (teachers, kids, etc.) to keep her safe, I've also been dreading just having the allergy conversation with the folks at the preschools we've been touring. Well, she got accepted to one, and the way it works is you accept and say you're going to attend while you wait to hear back from the others -- apparently this is pretty standard around here. So, we had our first allergy conversation with the preschool that she is, as of today, supposedly attending. (Can you tell I still have my fingers crossed about coming off the wait list at another one? For geographic proximity reasons, that's all.) I'll be positive here and say that the conversation went about as well as one could hope for. The woman giving the tour assured us that it would be no problem, that other children at the school did have food allergies so they were accustomed to dealing with it, and that we could leave EpiPens in the school office or with the classroom teacher, etc.. On the other hand, I have to be honest and say that even when given a pretty good answer, I felt like there was no possible way this woman could understand the fear that an allergy parent has. Because even when EVERYONE (parents, teachers, etc.) all have the best intentions, people sometimes make mistakes. I couldn't help but see the bowls of snack mix in the kindergarten classroom that we walked by and just start to worry. Georgia will be barely 3 years old when she starts preschool. Can I really hope to drill it into her head that she cannot share snacks with other kids? I think they have "snack parents" at this school that trade off bringing food in for snacks. I am hoping that we can get Georgia on a regime of just eating her own personal food rather than the provided snacks, even though the snack parents will be told not to bring things with nuts. Partially because in my opinion I can't really ask them to look out for any ingredients including nuts, fish, and sesame. (Although, how many preschooler snacks have a fish ingredient, right? I wonder about all of the DHA (fish oil) that's getting added to more and more things these days, though. Not sure if Georgia would have a problem with that or not.) But if we have Georgia just eat her own food, then will all of the other parents question why they're even being made to have to deal with my kid's food allergy and therefore just stop reading ingredients? (If she were in 4th grade, that might make sense, but I think at the preschool level it's still important to keep all those sticky pb hands and nut-crumbs, etc. as far away as possible - there's too much risk of contamination and sharing.) Is it time for me to just start trusting a little more, even though that might mean exposing my child to greater risk? I want to protect her (as any parent would). I have to balance that against the idea that I can't protect her from everything forever. Ugh. You can see I'm already going around in circles about this mentally. Broken record here, but can I just say for the one millionth time that it sure would be nice if a test for the severity of my child's allergies existed, so that I might only have to worry that she'll get a mild case of hives at school rather than worrying about something potentially fatal.

Other allergy parents
I feel comfortable discussing food allergies in this forum, but generally speaking I'm uncomfortable with it as a conversation topic. I guess I'm insecure, because I always assume the other person I'm talking to is judging me in some way - either judging me for having a child with food allergies (i.e., they must be assuming it's my fault!) or judging me for how I'm dealing with it (i.e., they probably think I'm being overprotective!). At a recent birthday party, though, it occurred to me that I'm perhaps even more uncomfortable and insecure about discussing food allergies with other food allergy parents. Isn't that awful? Aren't these the very people that should understand where I'm coming from the most? Yes, that is true. And I'm always happy to find them, except that there's no handbook for how to deal with children's food allergies, so I'm always a little bit dumbfounded as to how to address the fact that we don't all deal with allergies the same way. Perhaps the issue is that no one's way is the one and only "right" way, and yet I just so want to be doing the "right" thing, whatever that is. So anyway, at this particular birthday party, the allergy mom was allowing her peanut and tree nut allergic child to dive right into a bakery-bought cupcake with crumbled chocolate cookie as a topping while I was making Georgia have some more fruit and promising her that we'd get her a special treat later in the day instead. (I know, I'm horrible - I really should start bringing my own stuff to these parties, but I keep forgetting and then it's time to head to the party and we're usually running late already. Fortunately she's just young enough to still not really care about missing the treats, so I've been getting away with this.) I just sat there watching this other kid with her cupcake wondering, "Am I doing this all wrong? Am I being too uptight?" The mom in question happens to be a work friend of mine, so I was able to ask her whether her child still had food allergies. Answer - "Yes, but her allergies aren't severe - it would just be like hives or something. " Hmmm...already a different response than what our allergist would ever say. So I said, "But doesn't it make you nervous that one reaction isn't really predictive of the next? You know, that it could be hives last time, but um, something far worse the next?" (Don't want to say anything too terrible around the kids!) Answer - "I didn't know that. Our allergist never told us that." Hmmmm....for various reasons, I already had the impression that their allergist isn't the best. (My friend had even told me as much before.) But this is all very frustrating to me! Why aren't the allergists telling everyone the same set of information? Let me just tell you the two conflicting thoughts going through my head at the time: (1) Ugh! Other allergy parents that are not as vigilant as us are not helping our cause (see preschool discussion above). If she's walking around acting like possible nut ingestion is no big deal (she actually wants to try to "build up a tolerance" for her daughter by exposing her to more and more nuts (at home), despite her allergist having told her that that's not a good idea right now and her husband disagreeing with her as well), then how am I supposed to get other parents and school officials that come into contact with folks like her to understand that when my kid shows up, I expect them to take the whole allergy thing much more seriously?, and (2) Maybe she is the smarter one here. Because maybe if we look at our lifetime happiness levels, and the lifetime happiness levels of our children, her approach of being WAY more relaxed about food allergies and less protective will result in so much less anxiety and mental stress for her and her family that any medical consequences of the increased number of allergic reactions potentially resulting from her approach will be outweighed by the fact that they just didn't worry so much! I mean, I can guarantee you that she's not off thinking about this birthday party right now, writing a blog entry about it! : ) Maybe this is a case where ignorance really is bliss.
Anyway, it's like I want to go with conclusion #2 and just relax, but I can't get my mind to stop slipping back to the, "Yeah, that's all fine and well, but what if she DIES?" thoughts. You know what I mean? Ugh. Again, have I mentioned lately my annoyance with the fact that they cannot yet test for the severity of one's allergies?

Another reaction
Last week I picked up a loaf of bread at our neighborhood food co-op. The ingredients passed inspection, but Georgia ended up having a minor (skin) reaction to it. We think it was sesame, because other available loaves did include sesame as an ingredient. I feel like I should've known better, like my gut was telling me at the time not to buy the loaf because of those other loaves. But what does this mean? That we can only buy from national producers that can give me a better allergen statement, and we can never buy the farmer's market type stuff? Maybe. I don't know. I'll be doing a separate post later on my frustration with labeling.

Okay, that's enough dumping for today.