My poor baby boy! Last Monday morning I woke up and made us (me, Hanley, and Conrad) scrambled eggs for breakfast. I had previously read on a website I frequent for homemade baby food recipes that it was fine to start feeding eggs at 6 months old due to new research done. Cool, another easy option and I like when he eats what we eat because it obviously just makes it easier.
We were meeting my mother in law for lunch 30 minutes away so we started getting ready for the day. About an hour & a half to 2 hours after we ate, we were all ready to go and getting coats on when I was holding Conrad and he literally vomited all over the floor. It was like a grown man had vomited. I got his mouth cleaned up and luckily the way I was holding him it missed us both and only hit the floor. I thought maybe it was a fluke or he was vomiting up the teething tablets I just given him. I didn't know but I went ahead and put him in his car seat to go. I cleaned up the floor and no sooner, he vomited again, projectile style, all over himself and his car seat.
Thank God, that at that moment Michael walked in the door for his lunch break. I had him call his mom to cancel our date and I unstrapped Conrad to bring him to the bathtub to clean him up and give him a nap since he hadn't had his usual morning nap that day. On our way up the stairs, he vomited again - and in that moment I knew something certainly wasn't right.
I gave him a quick bath and started putting clean pajamas on him. By this time, Conrad was so lethargic he would go limp and fall asleep sitting up. Michael and Hanley were upstairs by now and Michael was in contact with his best friend that's a nurse. He vomited again, into a towel and luckily my mother in law was already on her way to our house to help us if we needed.
We called the pediatrician but they were on their lunch break and wouldn't be back for another 30 minutes. We decided we needed to take him to the hospital but I wasn't exactly sure the best way to go about getting him there. He had vomit all over his car seat and he was still vomiting so my first thought was to either call an ambulance or hold him in the back seat. Michael talked me out of holding him so we made our way back downstairs and once we knew my mother in law was close by to stay with Hanley, I strapped him back into his half cleaned car seat. We live no more than 10 minutes from the children's hospital but he still vomited twice on the ride there and started choking both times so I had to pop the back of his seat out of the base to prop him up further to help him.
I just kept thinking he was having an allergic reaction to the eggs but kept weighing all the possible culprits to the vomiting. Was it a virus that hit him abruptly? The flu (but he has already had his first half of the flu shot)? Did he swallow something small when I wasn't looking and this was his body trying to rid a foreign object out? He didn't have a fever, wasn't really crying or fussy, just vomiting with occasional lethargy (also due to a missed nap).
The ER was packed with patients and it felt like we had to wait awhile. Once we were initially seen for them to take his temperature they put us higher on the list of importance because of his age (6 months) and number of times he had already vomited. They were guessing he had a medical issue called intussusception (in-tuh-suh-SEP-shun). Intussusception is a serious disorder in which
part of the intestine slides into an adjacent part of the intestine. Instead of allowing food to go down, it creates a block and makes everything come back up. The ER doctor said they see at least one case of this disorder in young infants a day. It made sense even though I wasn't convinced and I found it weird no one asked me what he had to eat so far that day so I offered up the information and the fact he had eggs. The doctor brushed off my theory of an egg allergy because he wasn't showing any typical signs of an allergy.
Once we were in a room, the nurse started an IV in his foot to administer fluids and give him some nausea medicine. He vomited upwards of 20 times in 2 hours until the nausea medicine kicked in. They did an x-ray, an ultrasound, a catheter for a urine sample and ultimately came back saying they couldn't find a thing wrong with him so they just blamed a virus.
I was not buying that diagnosis at all!
We finally made it back home around 6pm that night and I kept racking my brain trying to figure out what was wrong with him. After doing my own research, it hit me: Conrad had an intolerance to egg, not an egg allergy.
Allergies and intolerances are easily confused. Babies can sometimes have an intolerance to certain foods, but this is different from an allergy, because it doesn't involve the immune system. Your baby has an intolerance if he has difficulty digesting certain food, resulting in stomach pain, colic, bloating, gas, diarrhea, and vomiting.
I was upset about our entire day wasted at the ER but I would have never decided to not bring him because he needed the medicine and fluids regardless of the diagnosis. And according to a friend that's an ER nurse, they typically look for acute and life-threatening issues so they probably wouldn't have dug deeper or research it like I did.
I don't have an actual diagnosis from a doctor but I'm 99.9% certain that was the issue and it will be a long time before he tries eggs again because that was so miserable. I just wish I would have mentioned egg intolerance to the ER doctor when we were still in the hospital and heard what she thought of that. I will talk to his pediatrician at his next doctors appointment it all.
He was fine by the time we left the hospital, and was completely fine the next day too...I'm just so glad he is better and it wasn't anything serious.
