Leah's Allergy Test

This is Leah at the Hershey's Chocolate World tour, and she is warily looking at the Reese's peanut butter cups...for a good reason. Our poor baby is allergic to peanuts! Today's allergy test proved it. *

I am so sad. I've always felt that peanut allergies were a tragic thing, given all the wonderful things in this world that contain peanuts or peanut butter. Not to mention the fact that peanut reactions can be so severe. And today when the nurse started demonstrating how to use an Epi-pen on Leah, I almost started tearing up. I was a little scared.

But before I scare all of you, I must remember two things: God is in control over Leah's body, and Leah has been exposed to peanuts in the past without any noticeable reaction. I clearly remember fishing a whole peanut out of her mouth not too long ago; it was placed there by her older sister.

I just hope that this allergy has nothing to do with my peanut butter and jelly sandwich cravings when I was pregnant....

Leah also reacted to egg whites, although not as severely. So we'll be taking eggs (including those in baked goods) out of her diet. This may help clear up her eczema a bit.

Eczema was the reason we scheduled the allergy tests in the first place. It just won't go away. There's no guarantee that food allergies are what's making the eczema outbreaks worse, but I'd like to point out that if it wasn't for the bad eczema, we would have never gotten Leah tested for food allergies, and thus we wouldn't have known that she is allergic to peanuts, and because of that we might have had a scary episode the first time I made Leah a pb sandwich!

I suppose it will be a while before we really understand how this allergy thing is going to play out in Leah's life.

* Apparently, positive allergic reactions are only 50% accurate with these tests. A negative (no reaction) result is 95% accurate. Leah had a very large welt where they stuck her with the peanut allergen, so we're interpreting that as a pretty good indicator that she's allergic.