ambah

to be quite honest most of the things jay eats from a packet does contain the words of warning re traces of nuts and i only just spoke about this recently with the allergy doc. golly gosh even his nutri grain he eats for breakfast has the disclaimer.

firstly i mentioned to my gp that he does have things that say warning may contain traces of nuts or warning manufactured on equipment that processes nut etc etc, she told me to avoid them altogether HOOLEY BLOODY DOOLEY he would have nothing to eat the way things are going these days.

so i brought it up at our last allergy appt and the specialist said to use my "discretion" basically jay eats stuff like his cereal (provided it is not nut based or musli based) he eats only one brand of bar (ktime twists) i avoid muslie bars or anything that looks nutty iykwim. he eats normal chocolate chip biscuits, cheese and cracker spreads, the usual kiddies biscuits like tic tocs, teddy bears etc and if you look at the back of these products they all contain the warning - i guess with jay if i am giving him anything new that he hasn't eaten before i am very dubious. you also have to be very careful with eating out especially with asian cooking as they do sometimes use peanut oil - so if we go out to dinner and it is asian food then we always ring and ask if we can bring our kids own dinner (and it is usually a mcdonalds treat 8-[ ) you do learn to live with the allergies but it can be frightening and i know myself it is always on the back of my mind and i make sure i tell everyone who happens to care for him whether it be an hour or all day or sleepovers etc.

re the specialist, there is a huge waiting list for the public system here to around 18mths, we decided on this doc as he was highly recommended to us and he is only in the next suburb, he is not public but private but really not that expensive - of course i need to get a referral from my gp but generally the very first appt is around $180 of which we got around $110 back, the skin analysis testing is bulk billed and the normal visit to him is around $80 of which i get around $55 back. i totally believe in getting a specialist as when i went to my gp around 2yrs ago for a referral (i need to get a new one every 12mths) she talked me in to not wasting my time and getting his skin analysis done at the gp's so i did that and in the end they couldn't give me any information on how serious it was or not and the nurse or the gp couldn't agree on the different way they measure, so i decided to just keep paying to go back to the pvt doc. look around, try and get recommendations (you would be amazed at how many children have nut allergies) you may be able to get into a pvt one without tooooo much expense.

good luck