Hives - the Saga continues

Daniel did NOT get a vitamin last night and he did NOT get hives last night. It was a small step towards victory.

This afternoon/evening, Daniel was bawling (it was quite attractive and pleasant to experience) because his jaw was hurting. Twenty minutes after I gave him some children's liquid ibuprofen, he had hives. Are you just as outraged as I was? I think I hear some of your groans.

I compared the inactive ingredients on both bottles. They both had FD&C yellow #6! (That's all they had in common.) But then I got to thinking that I'd given him children's Motrin on the way to his TMJ appt. on Wednesday and he didn't get hives from that. And that's when I remembered that he'd had hives just around his left eye. It was a different place than what we'd dealt with before. I originally thought he'd gotten splashed with something at his appt. I looked at that bottle. It didn't have yellow #6, but it did have yellow #10 as well as another color.

So I was convinced that it was the food dyes. Now what? Why now? What do we do? I checked with the clinic and the doctor I needed was in tonight, so we drove in. I gave him a brief history and my theory.

As it turns out, he doesn't really care much about the dyes at the moment. He says we need first to try to "turn off" whatever is reacting to the dyes (or whatever it really is). So the course of treatment for now is to give him 1 tsp of Zyrtec every day for a month (to try to override his allergic response) with added Benadryl if he actually gets hives despite the Zyrtec. If the month ends and the hives don't, we move on to more specific measures...whatever those are.

That's probably when we'll have contact with an allergist. The doctor wasn't sure there was an allergy test for specific dyes. Of course, I have no idea.

With the jaw pain that he was very vocal about and the hives that resulted from the medicine, Daniel has been center stage most of the day. As soon as we decided to take him to the doctor tonight, he was all cheery smiles and pep. Is this kid so starved for attention that something like this turns him into the best of personalities? Am I not meeting his needs?

I remember LOVING the individual attention I would get in elementary school when I got sick. I even created reasons to go to the nurse's office. (Are there any schools out there that even have nurse's offices anymore?) I don't think I was deprived attention at home, but the extra stuff still fed me in some way. Daniel is following in my footsteps already! What a special boy.