Nut allergy

Elizabeth was diagnosed with a nut allergy last year. For the most part it doesn't really affect our day-to-day lives since I'm not a huge nut fan, although I do appreciate a good candy-covered nut once in a while. But it's not something that I insist on eating, and frankly I could go my entire life without tasting a nut and I'll be fine with that.

Elizabeth hasn't had an anaphylactic reaction where her throat closes shut and she stops breathing, but she has broken out in hives and complained about her mouth hurting. The allergist has told us to keep an EpiPen around at all times, just for that reason. It's a prescription that hopefully we'll never ever have to use, but it's there, for that slim chance that we might need it.

I'm generally good about checking for nuts when I give food to Elizabeth, and she's generally good about reading the ingredient list as well. And if something has nuts in it, she knows to avoid it, even if it's a tempting treat that everybody else is happily munching on.

Recently I realized that Indian food (one of my husband's favorites) commonly contains nuts, so we're very careful to ask about everything that we order when we go out to eat.

And on Friday we had a potluck lunch at the girls' preschool, and once again, we were careful to ask about the common offenders. Thankfully the suspect items (a banana muffin and an Indian dish) were homemade, so the parents were able to say that the food that they brought didn't have nuts in them, and I was able to give the girls a taste of each.

Unfortunately there was an offender that I didn't know about until after Elizabeth ate it all up. It was a sandwich. The bread was a sweet Hawaiian roll (nut-free), and the filling looked like it was a tuna or chicken salad (apparently nut-free, at least in all of my previous sandwich-eating experience). I'm not a sandwich-type of person, especially for potlucks, but I know the girls will eat them, so I put one on each of their plates.

Elizabeth ate all of hers up, along with everything else on her plate, and she said her tongue tickled. I asked her if it felt like an allergic reaction and she said it didn't, so I just let it go. And then Abigail ate about 2/3 of everything on her plate, so I finished off her food, including half her sandwich. (Yeah, that's how I get my seconds at buffets now.) A few bites into the sandwich I realized there's some texture in there that's a little different from your typical sandwich filling, so I took a closer look and realized that there are chopped almonds in there.

Folks, I just fed my nut-allergic daughter a chopped almond sandwich.

Thankfully her only reaction was the tickly tongue, but it could easily have become a much more dire situation. I don't know much about allergic reactions other than what the allergist and a few allergic-children's-parent-friends have told me, but I have been told that a reaction to nuts that involves the face or mouth can easily become a reaction that involves the airway closing shut.

And that scares the crap out of me.