Adding Egg Back Into Nick’s Diet

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I am very excited to say that we finally heard back from Nick’s allergist about the blood results and things look good!  There was a significant drop in all of his numbers.  The doctor said that the numbers were very promising and it shows that there is a very good chance that Nick will outgrow his allergy.  I really didn’t think that he had already fully outgrown his allergy, but I had been hoping for a sign that he eventually would and this was it!  Now that he can tolerate it better we need to start reintroducing egg to his diet though.

I don’t think I can put into words how nervous I was at the thought of feeding Nick something with egg.  His reaction when I had originally given him the scrambled egg had been terrifying.  I did not want to go through it again, and especially not on purpose!  Still I know how important it is for him to eat eggs when he can to help fight his allergy.  Much testing has been done on how to help kids get rid of their allergies, and one thing that has worked is to slowly introduce it into their diet in small amounts.  Even kids with a severe peanut allergy can outgrow it when this is done correctly.  Our doctor told us that if we wanted we could set-up an appointment to have the testing done at the allergy clinic.  I would have preferred that, and it is the safest way to go, but our insurance doesn’t cover anything to do with Nick’s allergy, so we just couldn’t swing the cost after his appointment last month and after having to buy him new EpiPens.

Since we were going to do it at home our doctor told us how to go about it safely.  To start we were to feed him a baked good that contained egg.  We were told to start with something that was cooked at 350 for at least 30 minutes.  I looked through my recipes and found one for Chocolate Cherry Cake that had to cook at 350 for at least an hour.  I had all of the ingredients except for the cherry pie filling, so it seemed like a good choice to me.

I made the cake Saturday morning.  It called for two eggs, but the plan is to slowly ease eggs back into Nick’s diet, so I decided to go with just one egg and substitute apple sauce for the other one.  Seems that wasn’t such a good move for that particular recipe because it didn’t turn out exactly as it was supposed to, but it still tasted good.  For lunch on Saturday I gave Nick the cake in place of his regular egg free banana bread.  He’s been fighting a cold so he wasn’t too hungry, so he didn’t eat a lot of it, but he did eat some.

I was happy to see that nothing happened as he was eating lunch.  It can take four hours for an allergic reaction to occur though, so I knew I couldn’t get crazy excited yet.  After lunch we went for a walk so I grabbed the bag that holds the Benadryl and Nick’s EpiPens.  Turns out that I didn’t need them though because Nick didn’t have any type of reaction at all!

I am so happy that our first attempt at giving Nick something with egg in it went well.  Now that we’ve started we have to continue to give Nick small amounts of egg.  My next step will be to give him something cooked for a long time with two eggs in it.  Eventually we’ll work our way to things not baked as long and keep going from there.  At the rate things are going it’s very likely that Nick’s egg allergy will be nothing but a bad memory by this time next year.  He probably can even have an actual cake for his next birthday!