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Our 10-year-old son Stephen was diagnosed with a severe milk
allergy as an infant but had no further reactions until he was eight.
However, this episode catapulted him into unexpected and long-lasting
anxiety.
He became very anxious about having another reaction, developing what he described
as a constant companion, a ‘nervous feeling in his stomach’.
He refused to eat whole groups of safe foods and drew up lengthy lists of rules
for what food we could buy or prepare. He avoided touching surfaces away from
home, washed his hands repeatedly and asked us to do the same. Our vacation,
taken a few weeks after the reaction, left us at our wit’s end.
We sought help from a mental health therapist who pointed out that this was the
second reaction within a year, the first time that I had misread a label and
the first time that he did not ask for assistance immediately. After the reaction
he seemed to have shifted more of the responsibility of managing his allergy
into his own court.
The therapist assured me that Stephen did not have obsessive-compulsive disorder
and that his response was normal for this encounter with a life and death situation.
She told us that we needed to help him learn to cope with the anxiety and stress
that living with an allergy causes.
At home we focused on helping Stephen express his feelings in appropriate ways
without letting him control the environment unreasonably. Although the plans
for his safety were already comprehensive and very limiting, he wanted to go
way beyond this in an attempt to make the world he lived in safer.
We talked about the many risks we all take every day, such as riding a bike,
or driving a car and noted that we use reasonable precautions (wearing a helmet,
using seat belts), and that by carrying epinephrine (adrenaline) and consistently
following a food allergy management programme, we should be able to live as normally
as possible.
When Stephen was too fearful to live normally, the rest of us stayed the course
with the original plan for his safety and reassured him that he could be safe
without adding layers to it. When he wanted to wash his hands at every turn,
we let him. However, when he asked us to do the same, we politely refused if
the situation did not warrant it.
We continue to participate in activities we knew could be accomplished safely,
such as visits to the theatres, parks and museums, even though he was not entirely
comfortable.
He used a ‘perceived anxiety scale’ to let us know how anxious he
was feeling on a scale from 1 to 10. When he was uncomfortable, we asked that
he share his feelings of frustration and anger openly and respectfully and we
did our best not to personalise them.
Eventually he began to accept risk as a part of life. He is now doing well but
it took consistency, patience, understanding and constant reassurance for him
to feel safe again.
Our allergist’s jingle is ‘Educate, Equip and Enjoy’. Applying
the three Es to both the physical and emotional aspects of food allergy is essential
if one is to live successfully with it.
Courtesy of FAAN - www.foodallergy.org
First published in 2006
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