Newly Diagnosed Milk Allergy

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May is Food Allergy Awareness Month in Canada and May 10-17, 2020 is Food Allergy Awareness Week in the US.

Newly Diagnosed Milk Allergy

Up until very recently, I didn’t realize we had a food allergy in our home. My now 13 year old used to get stomach aches from having too much chocolate or cheese and had stomach aches at parties after cake and ice cream but I thought that was just from eating too much. What kid doesn’t have a stomach ache after a party?

Puberty seemed to make things worse for her all around though and she started having itchy feelings on her tongue and in her throat and her lips had a swollen part on them a few times. It came to be that she’d get a symptom from just sucking on a candy that happened to have milk in it, or tingly lips from one lick of someone’s fudgsicle. It was clear something else was up. We did a skin prick test to confirm a mild milk allergy.

Milk allergies don’t usually start late in life so I think what was going on was she was allergic from the beginning but just a little bit and it has progressively gotten worse. The question now is, will it stay mild or progressively get worse? I’m hoping for the former.

Even though it’s a mild milk allergy and we may never need an epi pen anything can happen and so we have one on hand at all times, just in case.

Now we are dealing with the big undertaking of figuring out that practically everything my daughter normally eats contains milk. We are reading food labels and looking for all those extra weird long names that don’t contain the word milk, but do mean there is milk in the food.

I will be posting more about food allergies, other allergies and asthma over the next few weeks on this blog. My daughter suffers from all three.