After 575 days on GAPS, Carter is offically healed. Now he eats everything!

After 575 days on GAPS, Carter is offically healed. Now he eats everything! Well almost everything! He's still eating a real food/non processed diet for the most part and we will stay away from soy in all forms and cauliflower, mainly because Mommy is still scared of those foods. We are sticking with the 80/20 ratio of foods because now he can indulge in a cheat every once and awhile and he's just fine!

Friday, March 11, 2011

Our New Home

Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, our new home.  It has been almost a year since Carter’s reaction to soy led us into this FPIES maze. He is now 22 months old. We have seen so many doctors and Carter has endured so much on the search for some answers.  Yesterday we had our appointment with Dr. N, who specializes in FPIES. It was our last real hope to find a treating physician to have on Carter’s team.  We left our appointment yesterday with an actual FPIES diagnosis that is in his medical chart!! It has taken so long to find someone who can really help us through this maze, but it has been worth it all!
Our new hero, Dr. N, listened intently as I told Carter’s story yet again. She never once doubted my words; instead she reaffirmed everything I had seen. When I told her about his reactions to meat due to the animal feed, she readily agreed due to the severity of his reactions and even understood the difficulty in finding soy free meats. When I told her about the respiratory distress he gets when exposed to soy, she actually believed me. At every turn, I waited for the “Well that’s very unlikely” or “I’m sure you were seeing something else” or “Those symptoms must be due to something else” but she never uttered a single word of doubt. And for the first time since this whole ordeal began, I actually had a doctor commend me on what a great job I have done to keep Carter healthy, thriving and growing.
It seems all the hard work has paid off. We now have a plan: No new food trails at all (less stress for me, trying to figure out what to try to feed him next) We will do an in hospital food trail in 8 months when Carter is around 30 months old. It will be with a food that he reacted to, but not one of his violent reactions. She said that by 30 months, most kids make a turn and begin handling proteins better. She is a little concerned that this may not be the case for Carter since he has had reactions to very low protein foods such as oranges and honeydew melon.  We are to update her weekly on his overall status and we have been given both her e-mail and cell phone number.  So for now we try to find a way to get him to drink the elemental formula (we got samples too) and we will see her again in a month.
She said that she has 10 FPIES patients and the other hospital she works with, Mount. Sinai, has 18. It is a rare chronic illness, but now I feel like there is someone standing over me, holding a huge flashlight and illuminating this maze so that we can find our way out.

2 comments:

  1. Hi! Our 8 mo old has been diagnosed with FPIES at Lucile Packard, too. Do you know of a support group for our families in the Bay Area? Best to your family and Carter! nikitha@hotmail.com

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  2. A friend's child has also been diagnosed with FPIES and she is having a difficult time getting into the Children's hospital in Wisconsin. Do you know if there is a network of doctors that specialize in FPIES that I could find out about?

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