So Much For Eating All The Allergens
I came home yesterday to find the house eerily quiet. When my wife and baby are home, there’s always some noise or I can at least feel their presence. Not this time. I looked around the house to confirm their absence and began to worry. Had they been kidnapped like the movie Taken? Was I going to have to go all Liam Neesons on some Albanian sex traffickers? No, it was worse. I checked my phone to find a voicemail from my wife. She was on her way to the emergency room with the baby.
I rushed over to the ER where, to my relief, my wife and Dmitri were sitting calmly in the waiting room. Dmitri had a slightly swollen face and red crap all around his mouth but was otherwise his normal self. His eyes were a bit swollen, too. He looked like he’d had an allergic reaction to pollen (or how daddy looks when he drinks alcohol — yay Asian glow!) As I wrote a few weeks ago, we’ve been feeding Dmitri all kinds of solid foods, even allergens. On this particular day, my wife had given the baby a mixture of peanuts and other tree nuts that the pediatrician recommended. The second it touched his mouth, he had a reaction. The ER doctor gave him a once over and prescribed some meds that made the swelling and redness go down. We sat there for an hour to make sure it worked then went home.
During our next visit to the pediatric clinic, we saw a different pediatrician than we did last time. The new pediatrician said, , “I know doctor so-and-so would disagree, but. . . NO MORE ALLERGENS! One trip to the ER is enough in a baby’s first year of life.” We agreed. Fortunately, my wife was smart enough to give Dmitri the peanut mixture a day before his pediatrician’s appointment because we also had salmon, shrimp, and crab ready to go for baby. All of that’s in the trash now (although apparently chicken and beef are still ok).
It sucks to know Dmitri is allergic to nuts (or maybe just one kind of nut; we don’t know since the mixture we gave him had so many nuts in it). Thankfully he didn’t have anaphylactic shock or anything like that, but the pediatrician still put in a prescription for an Epipen. It’s scary to think Dmitri might inadvertently come into contact with something that starts to kill him and we’ll have to jab a needle into his leg to save his life. At least it’s not like that scene in Pulp Fiction. Although, for the sake of saving my son’s life, I’d stab him in the heart. Then when I knew he wasn’t going to die, I’d pass the fuck out from having had to stab him in the heart.
