We went a couple of weeks ago to my daughter’s allergist to have another series of tests done for her. She is severely allergic to peanuts, experiencing anaphylaxis as a result of exposure to even trace amounts of peanuts, peanut oil, etc. Even as little as the smell of peanut on someone’s breath. She has always been fine with tree nuts, though. We’ve eaten pecans, walnuts, hazelnuts and almonds all the time. But in the spring, she had a bad reaction to a cashew. And last summer she experienced some tingling in her mouth and on her tongue when she ate a pistachio. So, we were worried that things might be escalating with her allergies. She is also allergic to white fish (like cod, sole, etc.). We wanted to have some follow-up testing done.
The last time we saw the allergist, my daughter was 5 years old – the age by which the doctors were hoping she would outgrow this severe peanut allergy. Because my daughter’s reaction to nuts has been so strong, the allergist won’t administer the regular ‘skin prick test’ for her because it is too risky – if any of the oil even touches her skin chances are very high that she would experience an anaphylactic reaction. So we’ve done blood tests instead. For peanuts, if a blood test shows positive for antibodies to peanuts, there is definitely a peanut allergy. The blood test has about a 60% rate of false-negatives (it shows no antibodies but the patient is still allergic to peanuts). She tested strongly positive for peanut allergy 3 years ago. She hadn’t outgrown her allergy by the age of 5, which means she probably never will.
This visit was much the same, with no skin prick tests of any of the allergens in question. So, it was off to do another blood test, but this time we tested the full range of nuts – cashews, pistachios, brazil nuts, almonds, walnuts, pecans and peanuts. We haven’t exposed her to any nuts since her incident with the cashew, not wanting to risk another severe reaction and a trip to the emergency room. The doctor told us that with her having a peanut allergy, there is always the possibility of developing new allergies – maybe yesterday pecans were fine and today she’s vomiting and getting hives and reacting violently to them. The test would let us know where she is NOW, but things could change without notice.
We got the call yesterday with the results:
- Very strongly allergic to peanuts,
- strongly allergic to cashews and pistachios,
- and a slight allergy to the tree nuts (hazelnut, walnut, almond, pecan, brazil nut…).
He said that my daughter is likely to continue to tolerate those nuts with which she has had no problem in the past, but the possibility for reaction is there. He said he wouldn’t expect exposure to those nuts to be critical, but that we should avoid contact with them as much as possible, all the same.
Peanuts have been difficult enough to remove from our house and all that we eat. Because her reaction is so bad, we don’t have a single peanut product in the 
house, our church and her school are completely peanut free zones, and we spend a lot of time educating her friends and their families about how we can all keep her safe. Being completely nut free is likely to be more of a challenge, though we’ve done it most of the summer. We won’t have to purge our pantry of the other nut things we have (hazelnut chocolate spread, almond butter as a replacement for peanut butter, frozen pecans that our family brings to us from the U.S. for most of our baking…) like we had to do with the peanuts, because the rest of us can still eat them with a low chance of it causing her any harm. We’ll likely not restock those things once we finish them though, and she won’t be sharing some of those foods with us, obviously. The biggest shock so far has been that she can not eat Honey Nut Cheerios, her favorite breakfast cereal. Regular Cheerios just aren’t the same, and even Apple Cinnamon Cheerios don’t quite cut it. (I can’t eat any of that either because of my wheat intolerance, but that’s another story.)
