week ending july 20, 2008:

Week ending July 20, 2008: I’ll start the story with last week when we went to Dutch Wonderland and Chloe’s stomach was too upset to eat breakfast. She really had a miserable morning because of it. I’d been putting off the allergy testing that the doctor recommended because I was hoping that the latest increase in medicine would help her enough that we wouldn’t have to bother. Chloe is really afraid of shots since her last well visit when she got 5 shots, but with the stomach problems starting to interfere with her life, I had to do something, so I called the doctor and asked if we could eliminate some things from her diet instead. She said we could try 4 weeks on no dairy protein and then 4 weeks on no wheat. We went to the grocery store to look for dairy alternatives and bought soy milk and rice milk. We already had some Olivio spread to replace butter, but we couldn’t find a good alternative for cheese or yogurt. In the first day on the diet we had quite a long list of foods that we’d realized that Chloe wouldn’t be allowed to eat including milk, yogurt, grilled cheese sandwiches, pizza, mac-n-cheese, goldfish crackers, waffles, etc, and a pretty short list of foods that she could eat. Every time she complained about the restrictions I told her that she could decide to have the test instead. After just 24 hours she decided that she’d try the test. She cried a little when we first talked about it, but at the actual blood-draw she didn’t cry a bit and said it didn’t hurt. The test they did is called a RAST test and it measures IgE antibodies (which the body produces when exposed to an allergen) in the blood and doesn’t require the skin-scratch test. What we learned was that the only thing that Chloe is having an allergic reaction to is the cat, but that cat allergies don’t upset stomachs, so we are no closer to figuring out why Chloe’s tummy bothers her. She’s been on the increased dose of Prevacid for over 2 months and I don’t see an improvement, and a friend told me that Prevacid upset her stomach and that she did better on Zantac, so I asked the doctor if I should cut Chloe back to the original dose, to which she agreed. So we are back at square one, we have no clue why Chloe’s stomach bothers her. The same friend with the opinion about the Prevacid also had a pediatric gastroenterologist to recommend, so we’ll see if her doctor has any better ideas at our appointment in mid-August. In the mean time Chloe’s been on the ½ dose for about a week and is eating a little more food at breakfast time, especially since I borrowed a page from our friend Lynn’s book and made and froze a double batch of chocolate chip pancakes.