Sometimes you just have to laugh…
My husband, Chris, and I have worked really hard to help JT to learn about and understand the severity of his allergies. To the point that I was even concerned that we had made him overly sensitive. About the time he was ready to start school (when I was probably over-loading him with information) he started worrying a lot more about things like touching dirty tables, his food accidentally coming into contact with his clothing, or just being near his allergens. Since then I feel that JT has been able to maintain a good balance of being very careful about his allergies without being totally over-the-top hyper-vigilant.
But just recently JT has regressed, not to the hyper-vigilant stage, but waaay back. It’s like for 2 weeks he had a weird lapse in judgement….and started licking people. Yup. Licking people. First he licked his Uncle’s hand (right after the Uncle had eaten a sandwich), then about a week later he stuck his adult cousin’s thumb in his mouth (right after she had eaten crackers and cheese). I have to laugh about it now, because it’s really just so ridiculous. He’s such a bright kid and certainly knows better than to lick people, allergies or not. Maybe he just got tired of being so careful all the time and this is his way of letting loose. But, aside from just being gross, “letting loose” has caused two pretty bad allergic reactions. Not reactions requiring the epi-pen, but ones that required benedryl and lots of monitoring. Fortunately we had a scheduled appointment with the allergist last week, so he was able to reiterate all of the things Chris and I had already told JT about why not to lick people. Starting with…”it’s gross”! I’m hoping we’ve seen our last licking reaction and we can go back to our happy medium.
Oh, and we did some blood work at the allergist, fingers crossed for good results!
adaptingtoallergies 