Fructose & FPIES Follies

We’ve been having an awful lot of fun here, lately.

Yes, I’m being sarcastic.

Let’s start with Zac:

First of all, he does not have an ear infection! Thank God! Apparently the symptoms he exhibited – clinginess, extreme comfort nursing, flicking his ear, lack of energy, crankiness, lack of appetite, and generally being miserable were a combination of two things: mild FPIES reaction and SEVERE teething pain.

The doctor looked at his ears and throat and said they were both fine, but commented on how swelled up his gums were where two of his teeth (on his left side, the side with the ear he kept flicking) were trying to pop through.

Make me feel like a newbie mom, whydoncha?

In all fairness, with the potential FPIES reaction it was easy to confuse symptoms and jump to conclusions. So we’ll chalk this one up as “children make you INSANE” and move on.

He DID have blood in his diaper yesterday. A little bit, but still, it was there. The rest of the day and this morning, though, he’s been fine.

Like “yesterday never happened I’m just fine, Mama” fine.

Maybe we’re being insane (we are), maybe we’re rushing things (we are – we’re desperate), but we went ahead and gave him more carrots again today.

He wolfed them down and was still hungry enough to beg for quinoa!

That’s good! Hopefully the carrots were never the problem.

That’s potentially bad! With any grace, he licked some corn juice off his fingers before we got to him (if he’d eaten a whole kernal, I KNOW there would have been more of a reaction!) and the beef broth and salt didn’t affect him in the slightest. But the potential for one of those two to be the culprit is still too high for my tastes.

After all, I KNOW he ate beef broth and salt. We don’t know if he got any corn.

So those are our FPIES follies. It’s all absurd.

On to Jed:

Last week I bought some organic, real food, health food store candy canes to decorate our tiny little tree with.

Jed promptly hid behind the tree and ate 7 of them in one sitting.

One problem: they had evaporated cane syrup in them. SYRUP, not sugar.

And Jed goes WONKY from cane syrup.

I’d planned to let him have the candy canes, but doled out one per day. Never did I imagine him eating 7 at once! (He would have eaten them all, too, if Darrel hadn’t caught him!)

We were prepared for the worst: mule-headed belligerence, temper tantrums worthy of an Oscar, mood swings like a 14 year old girl, undigested food in his diapers, light colored loose poop that goes everywhere.

Instead, we got a mildly cranky Jed with one slightly looser poop.

It was SUCH a mild reaction, it could have just been a “rough day” for a 3 year old.

We talked it over and realized that we’ve become so effective at emptying Jed’s bucket of fructose and keeping it empty that even an overload like he got wasn’t enough to give him a full blown reaction.

We were quite pleased with ourselves!

Then Jed spent the better part of three days between both sets of grandparents, and has come home less well-behaved than before he left, with a poop today that was light colored, loose, and had strings of bloody mucous in it.

So I’m sure he got a hold of some food he shouldn’t have eaten, and I’m sure the grandparents, while not completely indulgent by any means, let him get away with stuff we don’t let him get away with.

So now we get to “re-train” and “re-empty” Jed.

I just really hope the bloody mucous was a fluke of some kind, and not a sign that he got some dairy.

My basic understanding of how this works for MSPI and FPIES is that there are little “memory cells” that get left behind after a reaction.

Those cells just hang out in the gut waiting to see if the offending protein shows up again; if it does, they immediately signal an alarm and the body begins to fight the food.

Those memory agents are, as I understand it, regenerated after somewhere between 18-24 months. So to be safe, if my kids react to a food, we should avoid that food for at least 2 years before re-trialing it.

Jed’s last accidental dairy exposure was two Thanksgivings ago. So I had scheduled a dairy trial for Christmas 2014 to see if we could add dairy in to his diet.

If he was exposed in the last few days, well…our timer has been re-set.

Sigh.

(For the record, grandparents-who-read-this, I’m not accusing or angry about a possible dairy – or any fructose – exposure. He’s a sneaky little goose and besides, after the week I had, I Get It.)

So that’s the FructMal follies. More absurdities!

It’s not “Fa-la-la-la-la” at our house.

It’s more like “Fo-la-la-la-lollies”.

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Do you ever feel like your kiddos food issues are just a series of follies, too?