MomminginMinistry

Last week I wrote a little about having a growing teenage boy in his 13th year of dealing with multiple, life-threatening food allergies. I decided to write a practical post that's kind of the "inside baseball" of "What do you even feed him?" Mostly, I did this because when I first received that long list of foods to avoid, I wondered, "What else is there?" and good friends put me in contact with friends of friends in our position who gave me the play by play of their daily menus. I NEEDED that. When we first received Moses' cancer diagnosis a few years later, I scoured the internet for answers, and with such a rare diagnosis, let me tell you it took awhile. But I found a blogger who'd been where we were, and she connected us to an online community that have become our advisors, cheerleaders and friends.  I love it when God gives me the opportunity to pay it forward but providing some practical advice that took me quite a few years to figure ou...

 Sometimes I forget that this is terrifying. We've walked this trail for 13 years, and sometimes it's hard to see how far we've come.  But the road of raising a child with life-threatening food allergies isn't always linear, and it twists back and forth at times. I want to write this, not to stir up some kind of pity, but to maybe leave some breadcrumbs for other parents who are facing a scary diagnosis, or to help encourage empathy for those watching them struggle. Just like there are different stages of grief, there have been different stages of this.   Moses was exactly one years old when he received the official diagnosis, which stated he was allergic to a list of at least 12 things. A few of them showed an IgE that was off the charts. Peanuts, for example have an IgE <100, and that's because 100 is the highest they categorize it as. His IgE for peas are less than peanut, and peas had tried to kill him. I now know that any allergy can be a problem at any time...