Welcome to my blog!

This blog is a journal of our struggles with food allergies and eosinophilic gastrointestinal diseases (EGIDs). ("DD" stands for "dear daughter", so whenever you see it in the blog it is referring to my daughter and our personal experience.) My hope is for this blog to be a source of information and support to others who might be trying to investigate, diagnose, treat, or live with, food allergies and EGIDs. Feel free to leave comments with suggestions or requests of what you would like to see on this blog. This is a work in progress. :)




Our NAET progress

November 2010

I just realized that it's been a while since I've updated. We've been seeing our new NAET provider for about 3 months now (wow- I hadn't realized it was that long until I looked at the calendar!) DD has been treated and cleared for:
  • BBF (brain-body balance formula)
  • egg mix (she had to do this treatment 3 times before she cleared it)
  • calcium mix
  • vitamin C mix
  • B-complex mix
  • sugar mix
  • iron mix
  • and she did the grain mix last week (we'll find out if she's cleared at the next appointment)

Now don't get excited... just because she "cleared" the treatment doesn't mean that all these foods are suddenly safe for her (I wish!) As it was explained, all foods have a ton of different vitamin/mineral components, and sometimes you have to be cleared for each individual component before you can tolerate the food.

The only thing that we've "tested" at home was egg. DD is contact reactive (hives) to raw egg, so I figured it would be pretty easy to see if she's still allergic. I put a little raw egg on her arm the other day, let it sit for about 2 minutes, then washed it off thoroughly. Within about 5 minutes, she had one itsy-bitsy hive. It faded within the next half hour. So obviously, she is still reactive, though maybe not as much as she was before? It's not definitive, because I didn't leave it on very long. But it is a little encouraging.

It's so hard to continue shelling out money for a treatment (especially one not covered by insurance) without seeing immediate results. But I'll tell you a few things that we have seen so far with this treatment:

  • One of DD's reaction/inflammation symptoms is dark, sticky ear wax. She hadn't had any for a while, but earlier this year it came back. A lot of it. Gobs and gobs. We modified the diet, but didn't see any changes (I'm suspecting it was the quinoa that we added to her diet after losing buckwheat.) But there weren't any other major symptoms, so we let it slide. The first few treatments, it seemed like the wax was less for a couple days, but then it would come back full force. I stopped paying attention for a while, but looked last month and she had hardly any visible wax. I checked again today, and there is none.
  • After each visit, DD gets really emotional. Almost every time, we have a major meltdown when we leave (and since removing all her food triggers from her diet, meltdowns are few and far between, so this is definitely not "normal" for her.) I can tell that something is shifting in her body. What, I don't know. But something is happening for sure.
  • This week, she did the grain mix. We've been grain free for about a month, but probably should have been long before that. She is IgE positive to every gluten-containing grain that we've tested, and the gluten-free grains (which the allergist office doesn't have tests for, so we don't know if they're IgE or not) always cause some sort of digestive upset. The week before this treatment, she was having some sort of food reaction and was sleeping terribly. The night of the treatment, she woke up only 30 minutes after falling asleep, and I thought for sure we were in for a rough night. I woke up in the morning, and realized that she hadn't budged all night!! She has been sleeping great all week since then. Twice, she stayed in her bed the entire night, not waking once. And the times she has woken, she's quietly climbed into bed with us and fallen right back asleep, with no assistance needed. No tossing and turning, no crying, nothing. So I know for sure the grain mix made a positive change for her. I'll be really curious to see if it tests ok for her this week.

We're trying to decide right now if we want to take the GI doc's recommendation and get DD scoped (endoscopy/colonoscopy) to check for: eos disorders, inflammatory bowel diseases, pancreatic enzyme deficiencies, etc. I'll report back if I ever come to a decision. ;)

2 comments:

Eczema Mom said...

Egg is a real tough one, as we've come to find out. Before NAET it caused projectile vomiting for my son. We are now about 40 treatments into NAET with my 4 YO. After the first egg treatment, the rash that had been on his mid-section for 2+ years vanished overnight and hasn't returned. At some point after that treatment he accidentally had a soup with egg in it and all he got was a little hive above his eye. We've gone back to work on egg again, and have spent an additional 3 treatments using the egg white & yolk vials in addition to emotions. I'm told egg is tough because it symbolized new life and beginnings. Who knows, but we have seen other positive changes in my son so we'll keep at it.

Jessica said...

Interesting! It has been the only treatment for her so far that we've had to repeat, but it sounds like that might be pretty common. I, on the other hand, breezed through my egg treatment, but had to repeat the sugar mix once (quite possibly because I cheated in the 25 hour period. ;)