“Oh, it’s probably a reaction to eating a food he didn’t like,” my son’s pediatrician said when I mentioned hours of vomiting after eating a bite of a peanut butter cookie at age 2. “I wouldn’t worry too much about it if he didn’t have hives.”

Oh, how I wanted to believe this. My son never liked peanut butter, and at the time he pretty much liked everything else, so it seemed at least possible he could have overreacted. I stopped letting him eat anything with peanuts, just in case.

Over the next year, there were other episodes of unexplained vomiting when eating outside our home. Then came the day he took a bite of a cookie with walnuts. He immediately said he didn’t like it and spit it out. About 30 minutes later, he was vomiting in my car. This time a few hives appeared, but he seemed okay.

At our next pediatrician appointment, I mentioned that I’d like a referral to an allergist so he’d be labeled before he started school if he needed to be. The pediatrician put in our referral and a week or so later we got our appointment… for 3 months later.

At the allergist, I gave his history and said, “Yeah, I don’t know if it’s just a sensitivity, but I want to at least check it out.” I had no idea what I was in for that day.

The nurse numbered my son’s back and applied his “ticklers” containing traces of peanuts and tree nuts. There was also a dab of peanut oil, a control spot with nothing in it, and a histamine spot that was supposed to react no matter what. We were told the testing doesn’t break the skin, that it might get a little itchy, and not to let anything rub my son’s back during the 20 minute duration of the test or it could possibly mess up the results.

Within 1 minute, my son was asking me to come hug him and check if there were holes in his back. Numerous spots were already red, and I could tell right then and there we were dealing with an allergy. After a few minutes the nurse came in to check him, then she came back in with someone else, then the doctor’s head popped in.

“Wow, that peanut oil one is HUGE!” the doctor was saying as she returned to the hallway.

The nurse was sent back in to remove the peanut oil from his back at the 10 minute mark, halfway through the test. Maybe this should have been my first clue that something abnormal was happening here.

The next ten minutes were spent just trying to sooth my son and keep him still, as he was in obvious discomfort.

At the 20 minute mark, the nurse returned to measure his spots. Almost everything was either borderline or a clear allergy. I think there were only two spots that didn’t react at all.

The nurse wiped everything off his back and applied a heavy coat of hydrocortisone cream. She said the doctor would be in to discuss the results and left the room. My son and I sat down at the table to wait for the doctor. I’m not sure how much time passed. Maybe five minutes. Maybe ten.

Then he started to get very congested. He began to gag and heave. I started to get him up from the table and a nurse popped in. “He’s gagging,” I said. His face turned beet red as he coughed and gasped.

Within what felt like ten seconds, the room was swarmed. I could hear the doctor shouting orders for Benadryl, epinephrine, and prednisone. Was this really happening? Yes, it was. Anaphalaxis is rare during a skin test, but it was happening. I didn’t have time to panic because I had to calm my son who was beginning to shout and fight with the nurses, something totally out of character for him.

After we got him medicated and calm, he was still having breathing problems, so we had to do a nebulizer treatment. The doctor peeked in and said we weren’t going anywhere for a long time, and the staff put on another movie for us. (At this point we had already finished Ice Age. Next up was Planes.) Some of the staff came in and brought my son a coloring book, stickers, and a toy lizard. These small things really helped turn around what was a horrible experience for him.

Finally, the doctor came in and hit us with a fire hose of information. She made sure to say the words “life-threatening allergy” about 15 times. She made she we understood that because of his severe reaction, we had to be careful about anything he comes into contact with. He can’t eat anything made in the same facility with peanuts or tree nuts. No more hard ice cream. No bulk foods. Lessons in cross contact. No nuts in the house. No nuts at preschool. (We were already all set there. Thank God.) Get the extended family on board to keep nuts out of family gatherings or don’t bring him to those places. 50 other things. It was a lot to take in, especially after all we had been through.

I left there kind of joking that “This wasn’t even the kid I worried most about food allergy-wise.” My daughter has had food issues for a while, and we now have her appointment set up for allergy testing in December.

In hindsight, I’m amazed. It is only through the grace of God that my son never had a life-threatening reaction before his allergy test at age 4. Now that we’ve realized his sensitivity, every instance of vomiting he had after eating outside our home can be explained by cross contact with nuts. In one of those instances, we even let him eat Chex Mix that had nuts and we just picked out the nuts. I shudder to think about it now. That could have been disastrous. Now that I know more about food allergies, we should have taken the vomiting a lot more seriously. Hindsight is 20/20. We are just so so so lucky.

So that, in a nutshell (haha), is how I became a food allergy mom. I have learned SO MUCH since that day and plan to share quite a bit here about what I’ve learned and about our experiences with food allergies.

Does anybody have any questions about food allergies that I could answer in a future post?

PS. People who have heard our story have been nervous about taking their kids for allergy tests. I want to note that anaphylaxis is extremely rare during a skin test. It is so rare, a dear friend of mine took her son a few weeks later to a different practitioner at the same allergy office, and when my friend mentioned our experience, the practitioner said, “I remember that! It was a Wednesday!” The story stuck out to this practitioner several weeks after it happened, and that office does TONS of allergy testing. So while it’s good to be aware of the possibility of this happening, please don’t get too nervous about it.