This is a picture of her allergy test. Unfortunately I took this only a couple minutes after they pricked her back so you can't see where the walnuts and cashews reacted. Her hazelnut also got worse than this picture shows, but you get the basic idea. The other two spots (top left and bottom right) are histamine controls.
My other daughter, who is now 15 months old, had something called FPIES (Food Protein-Induced Enterocolitis Syndrome). I say "had" because she has since grown out of it (thank goodness). She had severe FPIES reactions to rice and oats. She would throw up for about 8 hours until her stomach was empty and then she would throw up yellow liquid (bile). Then she would have diarrhea for weeks. The first time we thought it was a bad virus (as did the pediatrician), the second time I was suspicious of the oatmeal, and by the third time it was obvious that it was a serious food allergy. It was so bad the allergist told me to stop feeding her solid food until her gut healed and then I could try veggies one at a time. She was 8 months old when we got her diagnosis. You can read more about FPIES here. FPIES is diagnosed by ruling other things out because it is a GI food allergy, not an IgE allergy. The reactions that show up on skin prick tests, like my older daughter's above, are IgE allergies. Non-IgE allergies, like FPIES, will not show up on these tests.
After about a month I tried sweet potatoes. She didn't have an FPIES reaction, but she had an intense gag reflex to even the tiniest amounts of puree on a spoon, or even a smidge on the tip of my finger. Here is a video that I took of her during this time. What you can't see in the video is that I only gave her a tiny bit off that spoon. It looks like I put it all in her mouth, but it was really just a smidge. Most of the puree on that spoon stayed on the spoon. If you pause it at 15 seconds you can kind of see that the spoon is still full when I pull it back:
After the sweet potato incident I tried various fruits - apple sauce, licking a melon, etc. and although she didn't throw up, she did have almost instant diarrhea that would be severe for about 6 hours (2-3 diaper changes an hour) and then less severe for a couple weeks. This would leave her poor tushie red and we couldn't use cloth diapers during this time because I had to put cream on her constantly and it was just too messy. I stopped trying to feed her solids and continued to breast feed her. Luckily she did not react to anything in my breast milk.
At about 10 months she started acting interested when I would give my 6 year old twins yogurt tubes. I let her lick a tiny bit and she did not throw up. I gradually let her have more and more until she ate about half a yogurt tube without throwing up. I started buying her whole milk yogurt and by 12 months she was eating one single serving yogurt tub a day. It was her only meal. At around 13 months I re-introduced her to oats by grounding up a plain cheerio and hiding it in her yogurt. Her FPIES was completely gone! Unfortunately, her gag reflex was not. She threw up everything that wasn't yogurt. I even froze little bits of yogurt to make homemade yogurt bites and she threw up the second it hit her tongue.
In September, at 13 months, I took her to a feeding and swallowing center where she had a complete evaluation. They observed her eating yogurt, was seen by a speech therapist and an occupational therapist, and was basically told that she was extremely delayed in feeding and swallowing, but perfectly fine in other areas. This is taking into account that she was born 8 weeks premature. They suggested putting her on Zantac to treat a "possible underlying GI issue" and that rubbed me the wrong way. Why do I want to medicate my baby for something she "possibly" has? Also, she used to have very severe reflux (which is a whole other blogpost entirely) and was previously on Zantac, but taken off of it when it was no longer doing anything for her. Her reflux disappeared at around 9 months. The doctor at the feeding clinic told me that I couldn't skip purees and that I should start introducing them with the yogurt, alternating a spoonful of yogurt with a spoonful of something new. This completely backfired and made it so she wouldn't even eat her yogurt.
I did not go back to the feeding clinic. After about a week of presenting only yogurt she was back to eating her yogurt happily. I continued doing what I was doing before the feeding clinic, which was giving her little bits of whatever the rest of us were eating. She liked to put them in her mouth herself and her gag reflex was getting better and better every day. I am happy to report that she has only thrown up once in the last month, and that was because she took a giant bite of my husband's turkey sandwich and overwhelmed herself. She still isn't really eating full meals, but she is consuming enough little bits and bites that she started having semi-solid poops in the last couple weeks. She still nurses about every 3 hours throughout the day. Her pediatrician is happy with her progress, but wants us to see a specific GI doctor, so that will be our next step.
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