“Mom? Are they gonna give me a shot? You know, like the last time?”
He looked up at me, and his eyes could’ve replaced the sun and moon, they were so enlarged and nervous. “I don’t think so, baby. I don’t know what they’re going to do..”
My voice trailed off. I didn’t know how to prepare him for this allergy test – would they draw blood to test, or give him those stampy-pricks in his forearms? We wouldn’t know until his examination. Until then, he sat nervously, feet wobbling beneath him.
Turns out, for children then use the forearm prick method. Even worse, they do it one-at-a-fricken-time. I already knew he was nervous, and the second they did one, it’d be all over, he’d spaz. And he was going to endure SEVENTEEN of these, each marked with blue marker just-so, evenly spaced. He was very anxious. He had already begun crying the second she cleaned his arm with the alcohol pad. Oh boy.
Then she pricked him with the test sample, and instructed him that, no matter how much any of them itched, he couldn’t scratch. He cried harder. She continued scraping near each dot with different allergens – oak, dog, ragweed, mold – each time he shook and tears fell and I felt even more helpless.
She was finally finished, leaving my poor boy a puddle of tears and heaving sobs, and already the control histamine sample started to redden, along with some of the first samples. He kept crying, wanting it to be over, wanting to go home. I did my best to console his fluffy curls while I kept my eyes fixated on the clock, trying to make it move faster with my thoughts. It didn’t work.
This is what I had to endure. My heart broken eleventy-thousand times over seeing his face like this:
The verdict? Cedar, Oak, Bermuda and Timothy grasses, cat and dog hair, dust mites, Ragweed, and four different types of mold. And those reactions were determined after testing only seventeen allergens out of the fifty-seven they would normally test for. God only know what else he could allergic to. My poor dude.
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