Emmy Update

{Concentrating on her beautiful sidewalk chalk art piece :) }

Our poor Emmy has had a rough summer in the health department.

After our trip to Disneyland in May, Kate got Hand-Foot-Mouth disease (but only in her mouth) and generously passed it along to Emmy. I have never seen a child so sick!  Not only did she have a high fever for five days in a row, the poor girl couldn't eat for a week and a half and she lost five pounds. And since she couldn't eat, she had NO energy.  She sat on the couch and watched movies for a week, straight.  It was a rough couple of weeks at our house with sick kids. The doctor said Emmy had it a lot worse than most kids get it.  She couldn't even swallow her own spit - gross but true! And we tried sending Emmy to her last week of school, but since she had no energy, she couldn't do any of the fun things her teacher had planned and she had to be sent home :(  She even asked to be sent home one day.  And she LOVES school, so I knew she was really sick when that happened. (Don't worry, I didn't send her to school until after her fever went away.  The doc said she wouldn't be contagious at that point).

She had ulcer-like sores all over in her mouth, throat and around her mouth (hopefully you're not grossed out by this pic, but if you click on it, you can see the little ulcers on the inside of her bottom lip):

The crazy thing is that her skin totally cleared up when she wasn't eating (she has REALLY bad eczema). That's when we realized that she was allergic to something she was eating. We already knew she was allergic to nuts, legumes and eggs and had already cut those out of her diet. So we started eliminating things from her diet, trying to figure out what other food allergies she had. In the meantime, her eczema came back.

She finally started feeling normal (it took a good two or three weeks for the mouth sores to go away) when she got a staff infection in her right foot. She has a bad patch that she always scratches on that foot and that's where the infection started. It got so bad that she almost had to be hospitalized. But luckily her little body fought it off, with the help of two strong antibiotics.

Here are a couple pics of her foot:

Her foot got so swollen that the skin on her foot peeled off after the swelling went down.
Now she's back to normal!  We've had our fill of sickness this summer!

We recently had her re-tested for allergies and found out she is allergic to:

- Cow's milk
- Corn (which is in EVERYTHING!!!!)
- Soy (if something doesn't have corn in it, a lot of the time it has soy)
- Melons
- Grapes
- Podded veggies (string beans, peas, etc)
- Chocolate
- Vanilla

I may be missing a few things, but, as you can see, the poor girl has a LOT of food allergies.

Now we are in the process of trying to get rid of the allergies.  I had heard of people going to Chiropractors that work with holistic medicine who can eliminate allergies.  I'm not an all-natural, holistic kind of girl, but at this point, I was willing to try anything to help my daughter have a normal childhood.  How sad will Halloween be if she's still allergic to corn? (Almost all candy is made with corn syrup).  And most cake mixes have corn syrup, so I would have to send her own treats with her to birthday parties.  Let's not even talk about treats at school or the lunch room.

I'll keep this blog updated on how the allergy elimination works.  We went for the first time today and we worked on eliminating the egg allergy.  We'll find out on Wednesday if it worked, and we'll move on to the next allergy from there.

In the meantime, Emmy starts her last year of preschool at the end of the month!  It's been a fun, lazy summer filled with being sick (well, that part wasn't so fun);
going to the park;

baking with mommy;

playing outside;

and picking strawberries from Grammy and Papa's strawberry patch (almost a daily ritual);

but we're ready for school to start!
Let's hope the girls can stay healthy and happy for the rest of the year!