FPIES Funk

You know that feeling when things are happening faster than you can process? Or when everything around you is all about food (holidays, party’s,…) and your little one can have none? Or when your child’s intolerances continue to stump physicians and you simply just want to feed him and forget this world created by FPIES?

I’ve been in an FPIES funk the past few days. It isn’t the reason I’ve been unable to keep up with my blog, that started with just enjoying our baseline (shhh.don’t tell FPIES), which was kept busy with the work on The FPIES Foundation, but then led to anxiety about upcoming food trials and landed us square in getting an upper endoscopy last week and proceeding to the zucchini trial we are in now.

The upper endoscopy showed mild reddened area’s that are familiar to some past scopes. The plan was for a food trial to begin- zucchini; but the biopsy results back the day we started the food trial showed villi blunting, again. Do we proceed with the food trial? What is the villi blunting from? Is this his normal? Is it related to FPIES or something else? Could he have small bowel bacterial overgrowth, and is this why he did so well on the antibiotics when he had the line infection a few weeks ago? Is every reaction causing villi blunting? Was this from the probiotic? And why? Those ingredients were “safe” for so many months – why would it now cause this? Or was it from the Sorry board game ingestion? We certainly saw symptoms from that. Or, is it from something else in his diet? In his world? A cross contamination from the soap I use to wash his bottles? The exposed sheetrock downstairs (gypsum is made from corn)? The potential cross contamination in the Bob’s Red Mill products I use (they process corn meal on the same lines, anything is possible)? An intolerance to the arrowroot starch in his daily bottles, feeding his small bowel bacterial overgrowth? If this is happening this frequently- without glaring outward signs, then no wonder we’re struggling with passing a food, and no wonder he has persistent and severe anemia. If the reactions aren’t causing just inflammation but causing villi blunting- it would be more severe, and take longer to heal…..and no wonder we are always cycling. It certainly makes sense for why.

Still so much to process, still so much as we continue through a food trial- zucchini….