Wishing For Normal

I wish we were normal.

I wish we didn’t have so many food issues.

I wish I were still obese and could feed my kids without thinking.

I wish my kids could throw up and I didn’t have to analyze every aspect of their lives to determine the cause.

I wish.

Yeah. And if frogs had wings they wouldn’t bump their butts.

We have food issues and I can’t change that. It’s a waste of time to wish for anything different.

But maybe after this story, some of you will understand why I occasionally waste time wishing for the impossible.

Saturday a week ago, I left for work on a 6am flight.

After spending 8 hours in an airplane getting TO work, I spent 6 hours sitting in the airport before actually beginning my work trip.

Then I flew to Hawaii and back overnight. A 13 hour workday with almost 11 hours of actual flight time.

Sunday morning I slept in the airport for about 6 hours before flying to Hawaii overnight again.

Monday morning I slept in the airport for another 6 hours before flying the red eye to Boston.

I got to spend 24 hours in Boston, where I did a LOT of cooking in my hotel room so I could eat for the next 3 days away from home.

Wednesday I was up at 5am, and flew from Boston back to San Francisco (via Chicago), at which point I was done with work!

Then I sat in the airport for 4 hours before catching a flight to Dallas, which landed at 12:30 a.m. Thursday morning. The next flight to go home didn’t leave until 7:55 a.m., so I got to spend some “airport appreciation” time overnight in Dallas (with no where to sleep).

Just as I finally headed down the jetway, I saw the other passengers turning around and heading back UP the jetway. Bad weather meant we couldn’t take off, and they wanted to delay boarding.

I flat passed out in the waiting area. I’d already been awake for 26 hours, after all. Fortunately, a pilot trying to get on the same flight recognized me and woke me up when they began boarding again.

I finally landed back home at 11 a.m.

I had finished actual work the previous day at 5 p.m. CST.

Commuting sucks.

All of that is to say…I was exhausted! Beyond exhausted, actually. Bone weary drained.

And the fun was only beginning…

I had a few errands I needed to run on the way home, and since it was Zac’s speech therapy day, my parents and the kids were in town.

We arranged to meet up and trade cars and kids, and I got the run down on everything kid related for the previous 20 or so hours.

The kids and I headed home, and in my exhaustion I decided to make Zac salmon for dinner.

We had taken a break from the salmon, as usual, and I was back home in case of a reaction, so why not?

6:00 p.m. Thursday night I fed Zac salmon.

At 10:00p.m., after he had been asleep for a little over an hour, he woke up vomiting.

He cried and screamed and whimpered and it was awful. The only way he seemed at all comfortable was being held upright.

Darrel had already taken a sleeping pill to go to bed, so I had to stay up with my sick baby.

Mind you, I hadn’t slept in 40 hours.

Not my idea of a good time, y’all.

Finally Zac fell asleep again, and he and I went to bed.

He woke me up at 9:00 a.m., crying and upset. I was so exhausted I just laid there and asked him things. “Are you hungry? Need a diaper change? Want some water?”

He kept telling me ‘no’, and suddenly vomited again.

All over me.

After that, though, he bounced back almost immediately. No crying, no screaming, no wailing, and he ate breakfast to boot.

An hour later, he was running around the house, playing as if the previous night hadn’t happened at all.

Obviously it was an FPIES reaction, right?

Well, maybe not.

(This is where I wish for normal. Beyond the desire to not be puked on.)

I couldn’t find my safe bottled water in Boston, and had no choice but to filter tap water to cook with and drink.

The first time I nursed him after returning home was right before dinner.

So if it was an FPIES reaction, it may have been salmon, or it may have been something in the water I had to drink.

However, the day I returned home, Jed suddenly came down with a terrible cold. Lots of sneezing, coughing, and a non-stop runny nose.

So maybe Zac caught a little virus, too; especially since he has had the same symptoms since Friday.

And let’s not forget histamine. In chatting with a good friend who deals with severe histamine intolerance, she pointed out her son has vomited from an overload of histamine before. It turns out I misunderstood the proper thawing methods for frozen meats and fish, and it’s possible the salmon wasn’t as low in histamine as I thought it was.

So maybe it was a histamine reaction.

And let’s also remember that Thursday the kids both played with public toys; at speech therapy, at Barnes and Noble with the train table, and at Carter’s with their fake wooden food that the kids both kept touching to their mouths.

So a virus or trace food from some other kid could easily have been picked up at those places.

See? This is why I wish we were normal.

If we were normal, I’d just say “virus” and move on.

Since we are not normal, we now find ourselves in an uncomfortable, ‘grey’ situation.

We don’t know for a fact what caused the vomiting.

We have to do process of elimination to figure it out.

We really have no choice but to try salmon again; we don’t know that it was an FPIES reaction, and since there are so many things it could be we must risk it.

Prior to the break, salmon was doing wonderful things for Zac. He had gained weight, was speaking more, and had a lot more energy.

Since the vomiting, his diapers have been perfect, he’s slept well, had a good appetite, and otherwise shown no signs of an FPIES reaction.

So we have to try it. I properly thawed some fresh salmon last night and cooked it for Zac this morning.

If he does okay with the salmon this morning, I will have to serve him some of the “improperly thawed” salmon still in our freezer to see if he reacts to that level of histamine.

If he has no FPIES reaction to the salmon, and then has no histamine reaction to the salmon, then, and only then, can I say it was the water or a virus that caused the vomiting.

This would all be so much easier if we were normal.

I’m finally no longer exhausted, but I’m still very, very tired from work last week. Going straight from work to the craziness of FPIES is way too hard on me.

From now on, I have to be home from work for at least 2 days before we start or resume food trials.

It’s just too much for me to cope with otherwise.

This is our life, and we will continue to manage it.

But sometimes I just wish we were normal.

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Have you ever had a confusing vomit that turned out to NOT be FPIES?