Food Allergy Symptoms – Peanuts

Here’s my story, my son had his first anaphylactic reaction at 16 months old.  We were at a corn maze and pumpkin patch that day and decided to try the local specialty, boiled peanuts. I knew that it was recommended that we not feed him nuts until about three, but he had no problems with any other food and no one in the family was allergic to nuts. Plus the peanuts were boiled so there wasn’t an issue with it being much of a choking hazard. Luckily, we were on our way home when he tried one peanut and we lived a short distance away. It seemed almost immediately after eating it, he started crying. We thought that we had mixed up the spicy peanuts for the regular ones. He was coughing and crying and wouldn’t stop. We still had no idea what was wrong. Then I saw welts all over. At that point, I realized it was an allergic reaction to something and gave him children’s Benadryl. I called the pediatrician and they said to just keep an eye on him and see if he gets worse. Luckily, he started to calm down and fell asleep to take a nap. We avoided peanuts from that point on, picked up a prescription for an Epi-pen at the pediatrician’s office, and scheduled our first visit to and allergy specialist. The skin prick test confirmed his allergy, it was still very hard to believe that my baby was allergic to peanuts since we never experienced this with anyone in our family before. Peanut and Nut allergy symptoms can be severe and lead to anaphylaxis.

The next phase was going out at scrutinizing every package label for peanuts. You wouldn’t believe how many products have peanuts or are manufactured on shared equipment. Even many of the natural baby food companies manufactured on shared equipment with peanuts! Who would have thought that there were allergenic foods for babies? If it was recommended that babies not have nuts until three, why would they make baby food come in contact with peanuts?

We had a good run until he was a month shy of his 3rd birthday. We were having a party to celebrate his baby sister’s 100 days. It sort of like a birthday party for her. We had many friends and family come visit and meet the baby for the first time. We were lucky that day that her face wasn’t broken out from the Eczema that kept flaring up. A friend of ours gave us a snack from another country. I didn’t see anything peculiar about the packaging, but the ingredients weren’t listed. I tasted the snack and it didn’t taste like peanuts so I let my son try some. Immediately, he started complaining that his mouth burned. Again, everyone thought that maybe the snack was spicy. Then there was wheezing, coughing, and the hives. I gave him Benadryl as I had done before. We were on our way out to celebrate my mom’s birthday and it seemed like my son was having more complications on the way. I called the allergy specialist and told him about the snack and that I didn’t think it was peanuts. He told us to head to the emergency room. They took their time in the emergency room. I think we waited an hour to be seen. My poor son had really big hives all over and was very itchy and having chest pains. They finally gave him an injection of epinephrine, more Benadryl, and Zantac. The hives started to subside a bit so they let me leave to get him some broth to eat when he was hit with a biphasic reaction.  He had to get another injection and was sent to the children’s hospital for overnight observation. He was fine overnight and was discharged. About a month later, we had more allergy tests done and found out that he had developed a tree nut allergy on top of the peanut allergy and the snack he ate contained cashews.