Now Maybe It's Soy

We had a chance to take Knuckles in to see an allergist. It is hard to find an allergist who comes to Tooele, and even harder to find one who will see an 11-month-old patient, so on Tuesday when I found one that did both and had a Wednesday appointment, I jumped at the chance. So now we are having an allergy test done on him.

Because he is so small, they had to do a blood test instead of a skin test, so they had to draw blood. I took him to the lab, but they couldn't draw his blood because there was only one phlebotomist there (she tried, and Knuckles was good, but she got about 1/2 cc of blood out before the needle came out). I had to take him to the hospital Thursday morning to get the blood drawn. He was so good and didn't even whimper.

We should know in two weeks exactly what he's allergic to. They are doing a standard food panel with all the major allergens (dairy, eggs, wheat, soy, peanuts, etc.) plus a test for gluten. In the meantime I'm keeping him on a somewhat restricted diet. I'm not knocking myself out to remove all allergens from his diet, but I'm keeping it as gluten-free and dairy-free as I can. We found out that Rice Dream has minute quantities of gluten in it, so I bought some Silk soy milk to try him on. He drank about 2 ounces of the soy milk and his face turned red, and he was holding his lips in a strange way, so I took away the soy milk and gave him some water and rice instead. Now I'm wondering if he's allergic to soy. The soy milk will not go to waste, though-- Sonshine likes it. I've been trying to get him to cut back on dairy in hopes that it will help his asthma, so I took him off fluid milk (he was the only one of my kids to be able to drink it anyway), but he didn't like the Rice Dream which is FH's and Princess' milk-like beverage of choice, so I think he'll enjoy the soy milk. And of course I like a nice steamed soy milk with a shot of caramel.

As much as Knuckles loves rice, he does get sick of it (not to mention constipated) so I'm really looking forward to getting the test results back. I'm driving myself nuts trying to keep track of all the potential allergens in his food.