For kids with severe food allergies, it’s a matter of life and death
As Told To Lori Holzman Schwartz
Chaim was born perfect — clear skin, blue eyes, an Apgar score of nine — but something changed after the very first time he nursed while we were still in the hospital. His clear skin turned flaky and red. He looked like a sunburned tomato. He cried the whole time we were at the hospital and didn’t sleep at all. Chaim was my second baby, and my maternal intuition told me that something was wrong. I kept asking the nurses to take a look at him, but they dismissed my concerns. “It’s totally normal,” they told me. “He’s a newborn. He’s still adjusting to the world.”
When we took him home, things went from bad to worse. His skin was chronically red and peeling, and he threw up around 50 times a day. He wouldn’t sleep more than half an hour at a time, and only if I stood up, holding him upright. I would put my older daughter to sleep, and my husband would hold him for two or three hours so that I could take a nap before I stayed up with him for the rest of the night.
I took Chaim to dozens of doctors — pediatricians, dermatologists, gastroenterologists. The first few months, the pediatrician wasn’t concerned. “It’s just colic,” he said. “He’ll grow out of it. Babies are often fussy.” But my sister Ava, a nurse and mother of four, told me that babies didn’t cry like that unless something was wrong. As a mother, I could tell that my child was in pain. It hurt me to see him suffer. I took him to four different dermatologists. They gave us creams and steroids, which helped his skin for as long as we used them. But the second we stopped, his skin would turn red and peel again.
It was only after Chaim stopped gaining weight that the pediatrician began to take us seriously. Finally, he sent us to a pediatric gastroenterologist. The doctor knew right away that something was wrong. Normally, she would figure it out with an endoscopy, which would allow her to see Chaim’s digestive tract with a camera. But she didn’t want to put a baby that young under anesthesia to do the endoscopy. Without it, she could only take a stab in the dark at what was wrong with him. She put him on medication for severe acid reflux, but it didn’t help. Chaim threw up as much as ever.
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