Endoscopy #4, Soy, and More

When Oliver was first diagnosed, I found several blogs written by parents of EoE kids. I remember being very frustrated by the fact that most of them were not updated very frequently! I've since learned that with many (most?) patients, things just don't change very often. Once we got Oliver pretty well managed, there just really wasn't much to report on. That said, I have been a bit of a procrastinator when it comes to updating, and there is a few things to mention from the past 10 months.

Oliver had his fourth endoscopy in April. It looked great. We got the best visuals we've ever had and the biopsies looked good and were eosinophil free. This meant that soy, which he had been consuming for the past six months could now be considered a safe food. Because of this added nutrition to his diet, we started to wean him from the EleCare. I say wean, because he was very attached to drinking it! We could have pulled it cold turkey, but that would have been hard for us all and we had a few more cans to use up.  I kept giving it to him while he was trialing the soy just in case soy failed and we needed to keep it in his diet to fill in any gaps.

We did blood testing and skin prick testing with the allergist and got the okay to trial chicken, peanuts, and almonds. I was hoping for beans and Oliver was hoping for oats, but neither one of those got the allergist's okay because he was showing up positive for them on the traditional allergy tests and there is no use trying a food that might give him a "typical" allergic reaction (for more on the difference between EoE and IgE allergies, see this post). I wanted almonds because I wanted him to have another milk source, and peanuts were all clear so we added that to the list.

We started with chicken, and though we had no very obvious symptoms he started constantly asking for food. He was eating non-stop and I *think* he was again confusing pain for hunger, and it's also possible that eating would temporarily soothe the pain (I've heard from adult/older kid patients that that happens). We pulled chicken and that seemed to stop. I am now afraid to do another trial because it's just so hard to know what foods are pass and fail sometimes! If we try all three, and we get a bad endoscopy, we have to assume all three are not safe because we really don't know which one or two it could be. On the flip side, if all looks good then all three foods become safe and we added three foods with one endoscopy which is quite efficient!

We have since moved to a new state and have yet to set Oliver up with new doctors, so we really don't have a plan for the time being.

Until next time...