Going out to eat with my brothers and children is always an adventure. Besides the fact that we thoroughly enjoy each other’s company, our dietary needs are quite intricate. One of my brothers is allergic to corn, another brother is allergic to dairy and gluten, and my daughter is a lactose-intolerant vegetarian. Fortunately, my son and I will eat pretty much anything (especially if it’s bacon flavored!). I tend to give my gluten/dairy-free brother a hard time because his diet is so limited. I’m his sister, and that’s my job. However, you know what they say….
What goes around comes around.
My daughter had started complaining about severe gastrointestinal issues while she was away at school. Since she’s 1400 miles away, there wasn’t much I could do about them other than asking some routine questions, assume she had a stomach virus, was stressed, ate something that didn’t sit right with her system, etc. etc. When she came home for the summer, we brought it up to the doctor at a routine check-up. We decided to keep a food diary to help establish a trigger. Although she forgot to actually start one, I kept a mental note. (I am a tiger mom, remember?) The other afternoon, seemingly out of nowhere, she began having severe stomach pains, feeling dizzy, nauseas, and eventually began throwing up. This was the first time she had been like this since coming home, and the only thing she had eaten in the last 24 hours that she hadn’t eaten since her arrival was peanut butter. That’s when it hit me. Peanuts! I asked her if she had eaten peanuts within 24 hours of any time she had been sick like that while at school. She couldn’t remember. I felt very strongly that somehow she had developed an intolerance/allergy to peanuts and told her. Now, you have to understand, as a vegetarian, peanut butter is a staple for my child. She has been known to eat it straight out of the jar with a spoon and can eat a whole bag of Reese’s peanut butter cups in one sitting! The more we talked about it, the more I believed that I was right. As if to prove a point, she decided to eat a package of her beloved Reese’s a couple of days later, and you guessed it. Within a couple hours, she felt like she had “knives stabbing her in the stomach.” She then remembered a couple of times at school having problems after eating Thai peanut sauce on her noodles.
So today was her neurologist check-up (she takes medicine for recurring migraines). She told him the whole story, and in short, we are headed for blood work. He explained that one intolerance often leads to another. She has been lactose intolerant since birth. Formula made from cow’s milk broke her out in hives when she was a baby.There is a family history of celiac disease, which means a gluten intolerance could be one of her migraine triggers, and now there is the peanut issue. Phew! Thankfully, there have been so many advancements made in the dietary world. Just wait until my brother finds out…
Words from the Long Run 