Top Eight Free: Your Guide to Allergy-Free Eating

My daughter has multiple food allergies.  By saying that I have conjured up in your mind an infinite number of connotations – health food nuts, fad diets, the annoyance of not getting peanuts on the airplane any more, or maybe the way that certain foods make you feel not-so-great sometimes. 

It would better describe our life together to say – my daughter cried five or more hours a day for the first two months of her life.  She was inconsolable, nothing I did helped, and I did everything I possibly could, including nursing her up to 14 hours a day.  Only at the breast did she quiet and seem content, and she nursed with a tenacity that I both loved and suffered from.  She would fall asleep on my lap and continue nursing while asleep.  To try to move her in any way would wake her, so I spent hours holding her sitting up while she nursed and dozed.   She could only sleep when she was on me – I discovered it was possible to sleep propped up on the couch with pillows wedged around us so she wouldn’t fall.  I never dipped below the surface of sleep.  I was constantly aware, even while dreaming, of my hands holding her on me.   

I could not set her down.  I don’t mean this in the sense of a starry-eyed new mother desperately in love with her infant, though I was that as well.  I mean that if I set her down, even for an instant, she began to scream, and she continued to scream until I picked her up again.   Occasionally I could hand her off asleep to another set of arms, but often she would wake, unhappy about where she found herself.  After the first few weeks even family members became unwilling to hold her while I showered. 

In the heat of the southern Indiana summer, I walked around and around my neighborhood with my daughter strapped upright to my chest in a sweat-soaked sling.  As we walked I would sing her a song composed in desperation one night.  It went like this “Podling, podling, podling, I’ll sing you a song.  Podling, podling, podling, you tell me what’s wrong.”  But of course she couldn’t. I obsessively read baby books.  Nothing in them seemed to describe the experience I was having.  Friends sent me books titled “The happiest baby on the block” and “How to make a baby laugh,” which tormented me further.  I tried everything in the books and my baby still cried for hours every night. 

I began to feel like I was a failure as a mother, that I was lacking some internal essence of mother-ness, so that even though I wore my baby in a sling for at least 4 hours each day, sang to her, played white noise, “slept” next to her all night, jiggled and bounced her, surrounded her only with super-soft 100% cotton, massaged her, and everything else I could think of, even though I did all these things I was lacking the touch of a mother, because I couldn’t make my baby happy.  I couldn’t even get her to sleep.   We discovered that if we swaddled her tightly in a baby blanket, she couldn’t thrash around so much and wake herself.  She could sleep for up to an hour if snuggled close to me.

Even given my limited experience with babies, I felt something must be wrong.  Her poop, the only output we had to go on other than the crying, seemed weird.  I took her to the doctor.  I told the doctor that in addition to the weird poop, she was nursing all the time and that I was desperate for sleep.  It wasn’t until months later that I would realize these are the things all new mothers say.  I didn’t realize I needed to quantify for the doctor:  Saying: “She is nursing 14 hours a day.  I am getting less than 4 hours of sleep a day” might have gotten me some attention.  

One day in late August some friends stopped by.  We decided to order some Indian take out and eat dinner together.  This mundane occurrence would turn out to be not only the last time these particular friends stopped by, but the last time anyone stopped by our house for the next few years.   It would be our last dinner with friends, our last Indian food, the end of a life in which dinner gatherings were impromptu and didn’t involve packing like we were going back-country camping. As we started to eat, my daughter started to scream.  It was early for the screaming to start for her, and seemed unusually severe.  Bouncing had no effect.  She would nurse for a few moments, and then pull away and scream some more.  Her face was completely red, her body rigid.   We continued to trade off – one person trying to calm her in the other room and the other trying to maintain a normal conversation with our guests, who were shifting around in their seats and looking towards the door.  My partner called me from the other room, and I went to join her.  My daughter was on the changing table and she had a huge raised red welt on her bottom.  Oh, we thought – diaper rash. 

Late that night, after almost 8 hours of screaming, I looked up diaper rash in the baby books.  The description didn’t match.  I kept reading until I came to something called an “anal ring rash” which sounded exactly like my daughter’s rash.  It was caused by food allergies.  As I read more, I found that mucousy poop was something to be concerned about, and was another sign of allergies or food intolerances.I stopped eating dairy products.  The rash continued.   I stopped eating tomatoes, a hardship for me in late August in the midst of a bumper tomato crop.  The rash went away, but the crying and nursing and weird poop continued. 

We went back to the doctor, and another doctor.  The doctors’ responses were that newborns have weird poop   I told them her poop looked like egg-drop soup and that she seemed to be having diarrhea.    But she’s seven weeks old, we said, she’s not a newborn anymore.  And I stopped eating dairy products and she still seems sick.  One doctor said “Well some babies are allergic to their mother’s milk.  You might try formula and see if it gets any better.”   I went home in tears.

That afternoon I was checking my email, standing next to the buffet with the laptop on it while my daughter dozed restlessly upright in the sling.   I started searching on the internet for something, anything to help.  I began reading a breastfeeding bulletin board.  I posted a desperate message saying that my baby was nursing 14 hours a day and I thought I wasn’t going to be able to keep nursing.  The next day, there was a message for me that said “Do you eat a lot of soy?”  I responded yes – I’d had soy milk on my breakfast cereal, a soy yogurt for a snack, some tofu at lunch… actually, soy at  every meal.  I was a lactose-intolerant vegetarian, after all.  I needed soy to stay alive, I couldn’t give it up.  The nurse on the bulletin board told me that my description of my daughter sounded like a baby with food allergies and that I should try an elimination diet. (Note: I do not condone accepting medical advice from stangers on the internet.  This story is meant to convery my desperation, not to suggest this is a reasonable way to go about getting medical help.  Please don’t follow my example!)  I eliminated the top eight allergens from my diet.  I ate beans and brown rice and steamed vegetables and a lot of hummus and carrots.  That was all I could think of to eat in my fog of sleep deprivation.  Two days later my daughter stopped nursing so much and began sleeping almost like a normal newborn.  Within a week we stopped having to straightjacket her in baby blankets to keep her asleep.  The crying got better.  I started to feel like a capable mother who could actually soothe her crying baby.Things were hardly perfect, and she was still far from normal, but she began to sleep without nursing to stay asleep.  I still had to hold her all the time, even while sleeping, but she seemed to be in less pain.  It took months of food diaries and trials to isolate the problem foods (and actually we are still discovering new allergies, years later), but we eventually found she was allergic to soy, dairy, nuts, peanuts, eggs, black eyed peas, black beans, and lentils. (These were later confirmed by skin pirck testing.)  She was allergic to my entire vegetarian diet.    

Having a baby changes everything.  But what if that baby is sick?  Then it turns your world upside down. 

Our lives are not what we thought they would be post-baby.  My daughter is now three and still relies on breastmilk for her main calcium and protein source.  I haven’t been away from her for more than three hours in the last three years.  I haven’t been able to go back to work, even part-time.  My partner and I haven’t gone out to dinner together since the night before labor was induced.  For the first two years, she was sick two or three days out of each week, which meant at least 48 hours of sleepless screaming.   The first time she “slept through the night” (the medical definition of five hours) was when she was almost three. 

Children are never what you expect them to be.  But some children stretch their parents’ resources more than others.  Several research studies show that food allergies have a huge impact on quality of life and stress levels of the entire family.  It has helped me to conceptually frame food allergies as chronic illness.   Adapting to a chronic illness involves going through the normal cycle of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) similar to adapting to the loss of a loved one.  Even if you have the smartest, cutest, most wonderful child in the world there can still be an element of sadness or loss of your previous “normal” life.  Part of adapting to food allergies is finding a new normal for your family.