The worst thing about having an allergy baby isn’t the difficulty in finding foods they can eat or substitutions that taste somewhere near to the real thing or the daily monotony of wiping down everything they come into contact with, it’s the thought ‘what if I miss that moment and somehow he comes into contact with a nut’.
We finally had to face that fear the night that our little Jos was born. After a long day in the hospital for Harry it was time to say goodbye to mummy and his new baby sister and head home with daddy. I had to stay in the hospital that night and this would be my first night away from my little boy, something I’d dreaded ever since we were told about his allergies, as it turns out with good reason.
At 11pm when the ward was finally getting peaceful and I had just dosed off a nurse woke me up to say that my little boy and husband were downstairs waiting for me. I was so confused with the lack of sleep I reassured her that they knew I was staying in so couldn’t be here to pick me up, besides it was far too late for my little boy to be out of bed anyway.
But they were indeed downstairs having been ambulanced in to A&E. Harry after going to sleep woke up screaming then shortly after that started struggling to breath. His brilliant dad and my wonderful husband called the fantastic 111 service who, while hubby was on the phone advised him to administer the epi pen when harry finally collapsed after not being able to get enough air through his swollen throat into his lungs.
We still do not know what set off the attack. We assume he must have come into contact with some nut protein during the day but to be honest it could have been anything. So many hands and kisses congratulating him on his achievement we couldn’t track down every nurse or doctor that he’d met to ask them what they had eaten that day. Believe me we considered it for a long time.
As soon as hubby put the epi-pen into his leg he jumped sky high and started breathing albeit laboured. By the time I’d waddled down from the maternity unit to A&E Harry had been booked in and although very shaken and upset by the whole experience was already on the mend.
Its not an experience I can talk about very easily, just the thought of it makes my own throat close over. Hopefully that’ll be the one and only experience with an epi-pen in his life and now we know for sure that one of us has the balls to actually administer it. My lesson has definitely been learned though, I’m not spending another night away from my little man, babies or otherwise!
My Allergy Baby 