Walnuts of Woe... or not?

Alex's family has some weird history on this phrase, "Walnuts of Woe," but I'm not quite sure I know it. At any rate, I titled this post as such because last summer, we found out that Lucia has a high allergy to walnuts.

To make a very long story short, Lucia had inconsistently displayed pink rashes around her mouth and back of her neck from eating salmon and sometimes shrimp. My parents convinced me to take her to the doctor after a certain episode, and we ended up getting Lucia a "prick test." They tested: left low is control (3), next is almond (nothing), brazil nut (nothing), cashew (3), filbert (4), peanut (2-okay), pecan (3), walnut (6!), 3rd wheat, egg, milk, soy all nothing, 4th crab clam (nothing), salmon (3), shrimp (4) Here is the photo:

From Blog All

At any rate, we were freaked out about the walnuts, and eventually bought two Epinephren pens (at a relatively substantial cost with a relatively short shelf life - ~$150 for two pens, shelf life of just over a year, though the doc said they are actually good beyond that up to almost 5 years). We took one pen to daycare, and carried the other in the diaper bag.

So almost two weeks ago, Feb 5, at Family Friday, we gave Lucia what looked to us like a chocolate chip oatmeal cookie. She loves cookies, and gobbled it down, then went off to run around and play again. About 5-10 minutes later, I took a cookie. "Oh my GOSH! These cookies have WALNUTS in them!" I gasped to Alex. Freaking out, we look for Lucia... who is running around carefree and doing just FINE. So fine, in fact, that it wasn't until about 5 minutes later, and after Alex busted out the instructions on the Epi Pen, that she had about 10 pink dots the size of small peas surrounding her mouth, but nothing more.

At any rate, we are very grateful that we had this experience. It goes to show that the article in the New York Times on allergies may be right, in that the only way to truly tell a food allergy is by actually ingesting the food and seeing what happens. We had considered doing a controlled test at the hospital with Lucia and walnuts, but now we don't have to. Not like we're going to go out of our way to get her to eat them, but at least I don't have to totally freak out that she's going to die if someone gives her walnuts and we don't stab her with an epi pen and get her to the emergency room in 5 minutes flat.

Good to know.