Sometimes I begin to think what will I write about, and then suddenly, some thing allergy related pops up. Here is my week in review…

1. Friend’s child is recovering from strep throat. After first dose of amoxicillin, she throws up. Mother is allergic to penicillin, now they believe the child is, too. Had to switch antibiotics and add allergies to doctor chart.
2. Run into friend in the grocery store. We discuss (as all moms do) how we are pressed for time, but she has to go to another store to find packaged foods that do not contain MSG. Her youngest child suffers from headaches whenever she ingests MSG (which as we all know, is found in a plethora of foods). I understand this one as I get headaches every time I eat a certain pizza from a certain restaurant, so though I love it, I’ve given it up.
3. My daughter has a friend coming over after school. I talk to the friend’s mom to find out if there is anything he can’t eat. Though he is not allergic in an anaphylactic sense, he cannot eat too much dairy or sugar. If he does, he will have stomach and digestive problems.
4. Turns out my tennis coach is allergic to nuts. We discuss her allergy and my daughter’s, and she is very open to trying NAET. She describes her allergy and tells me she goes by PAW, pecans, almonds, and walnuts being the nuts she needs to stay away from. She invented the acronym to help her friends remember when she is out with them, just in case. I give her the number to our NAET practitioner.

So that’s my week. I don’t think I’ll ever have trouble finding a topic to write about because allergies are really all around us. We tend to think of the big 8 food allergies and anaphylaxis, or we think about spring and fall and seasonal pollen allergies. It goes far beyond that, however. So many people, though, live allergies every day and are searching for ways to stay healthy and safe. Whether it is an allergy to medicine or to a food even though it’s not the typical reaction, it can be not only difficult, but just make you feel all around lousy when you suffer from some form of allergy. Maybe it’s not life threatening, but who wants to go around with digestive problems or headaches all of the time? Remember, the definition of an allergy is a damaging immune response by the body to a substance, esp. pollen, fur, a particular food, or dust, to which it has become hypersensitive. Hypersensitivity can encompass a large variety of symptoms.