Eczema, bad skin, and a year being told to not allergy test
Our littlest one has had eczema and bad skin from about week two old for the past year and a half.
During this time she was also hospitalized twice with croup and we now have $7 steroids if she starts wheezing to prevent that $5000 hospital visit.
There’ve been few nights of not at least some nasal issues and only a few days of good skin in her entire life.
We’d been advised to not go to an allergist due to a kiddo not being able to properly identify an allergy before about 2 or three years old and given some stuff to try that didn’t really work.
A few months back I was having serious breathing problems and went in and got tested for allergies, asthma, sinus issues, etc and discovered that I was allergic to several things in my house. I ended up getting re-tested recently because I had some residual antihistamines in my system at time of initial testing (they had said eff it, come in if you’re dying, which I felt I was.) I got a course of allergy shots started.
Finally decided just screw it, get the baby tested too. She walks in grass, her legs turn red and itchy. A cat walks by and she’s coughing. I know she’s got reactions to these things and decided it was time to try for something better for her.
Allergist doctor gives us about the same speech the pediatrician did but told us a completely different angle of attack for the skin. We’d been bathing sparsely per pediatrician’s recommendation, oatmeal based this that or the other for cleaning, no petroleum products.
We were given a little inhaler for daily use, a mega-inhaler for bad times, and a spacer to help with breathing and told to get some Aquaphor for night time and Eucerin non-oatmeal for daytime. Bathe once a day in normal temp water. Only use mild fragrance free (not unscented,) soap once a week. We were also given a topical steroid cream to use in the event of flare ups.
One use of the flare up cream, and then bathing every day, Eucerin when she wakes up, Aquaphor after bath, and skin was almost perfect at six days. Itchy elbows and behind her knees are gone, patches are gone, skin is baby soft finally.
The allergy test they decided to limit to indoor allergens, which ended up being six or seven things. She was just under whatever the cutoff for allergy is on cat and roach particulate. The histamine control test was about three inches wide. Yes, inches, not CM. It was as wide as my pinky finger is long from the knuckle. The nurse had not seen that much of a reaction before evidently.
It’s my guess that those cutoff allergies will probably develop into full-blown cat allergies at some point, but we’ll see.
We made a game of using the inhaler. Nose and breathing has almost completely cleared up, but that might be due to the warmer weather. With the better skin, she doesn’t seem to break out in the grass.
BTW, Aquaphor and Eucerin can be obtained for quite a bit less than my Amazon links above at Target or other third parties. Just make sure to get the non-oatmeal kind.
Not a testimonial, just an observation at this point. Something to try if your kiddo has similar. It’s currently my belief that the skin stuff would probably have cleared up with the bathing/ Aquaphor/Eucerin regimen.
Update at two weeks
She’s coughed about one night in the past two weeks that we noticed. Usually when she’d go to bed there would be some intermittent coughing throughout the night. Not sure if this is the steroid they gave or that I slapped an air purifier in her room.
Skin is pretty good. She’s got an allergy to Huggie’s diaper waistbands we think but other than a bean-sized patch of eczema or a bug bite she’s doing fine. Skin care regimen we put her on has her glowing. To get her to take the breathing medicine we play a thing called The Breathing Game complete with announcer voice.
