The allergist

Thanks to a cancellation we had our appointment with the allergist on January 29, 2010.  He was very nice, took a very detailed history, and asked if I wanted the scratch test done that day.  Although I wasn't expecting it (given that the receptionist specifically called the appointment a "consultation"), I figured we might as well since we were there anyway. They were booking appointments into March so it would have been a while before we could get in again.  We did milk, egg yolk, egg white, peanut, dust mites (apparently a very common cause of eczema, which I didn't know) and orange.

We got a strong positive result for milk, as expected.  Got a weak positive for egg white (likely the cause of our Christmas morning reaction).  And finally, got a very strong positive for peanut, which was NOT expected.  He'd never had peanut before, but had likely been exposed to it as Mike and I were not very careful with it (for example, I would eat peanut butter toast while feeding Dylan breakfast - he wasn't eating the pb, but likely came into contact with it).  They even redid the peanut scratch, and got another positive result, though weaker the second time.  I absolutely hated the scratch test.  Dylan was just so upset, and the poor little monkey didn't even understand what was going on.  I hated putting him through that.

The results prompted the allergist to recommend blood tests.  He said that he normally didn't like doing blood tests on children as young as Dylan, but given that he was in a daycare setting he felt it necessary.  In addition, children with eczema can react to scratch tests due to their sensitive skin, so a false positive result was possible.  (As an aside, that frustrated me a bit - if you knew that children with eczema can get false positives from scratch tests, why do them?  Why not just skip to the blood tests?)  So we decided to do blood tests for the 3 positive results, and also for mustard, which they didn't have available for the scratch test.  We also got prescribed epi-pens due to the severity of his reaction Christmas morning.

We got the blood tests done February 3, and they went better than I had expected.  He freaked out as soon as I laid him on the bed (of course) but the nurse doing the procedure was slick. He was crying, but his cry didn't change in pitch or intensity when she stuck the needle in, so she didn't seem to hurt him.  In fact, I was singing twinkle twinkle to try and distract him, but stopped when we were done. I picked him up and hugged him and kissed him and told him he was brave, then he touched my lips and signed 'more'. I thought he wanted more kisses but realized that he wanted more singing! Probably the only person in the world who would!  Now we were just waiting for the results, which we were told would take up to a couple of weeks.