When someone in your family has a mystery reaction, how do you deal with it after-the-fact.
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So, with a mystery reaction, what do YOU do about anything new? How long before reintroducing? Or do you just get rid of everything new?
I haven't read the rest of your post, Silver, because I do get the sense that you'd like a check of what we
actually do-- and sadly, I have some very recent experience to draw from.
I become
Torquemada. No, really. I should insert a blushing emoticon here.
What were you doing at the time? No-- details. Who was with you, where had they been, did so-and-so-wash his/her hands, was anything else happening around you, give me details of sensory inputs-- WALK.ME.THROUGH.IT.I have
never been so happy (well, okay-- um-- probably not the right term) as when DD's boyfriend proved to be someone with near-eidectic memory and sequencing this past three weeks. He pays a TON of attention to his surroundings, and he operates nearly like a video recorder on replay. It was awesome, and it allowed me to make some serious educated guesses as to the causation of that most recent reaction-- and making that educated guess, and talking to Dr. Awesome about it, to make changes in our pharmacology.
Anyway. I digress.
After "walk me through it" I basically repeat that process going backwards in time step-by-step, about 30 minutes for each "step" until I get a list of suspect things. GI reactions,
always focus on food or sources of food residue and possible routes of consumption. ALWAYS.
Reactions that present cutaneously or with asthmatic symptoms tend to be environmental exposures, though with DD's threshold, that includes food as well.
We do look at "what was new" but probably not as rigorously as we examine potential routes of food exposure-- locations, events, activities occurring in those venues, previous contact and transfer, people and where they have been, etc. KWIM? That is idiosyncratic, but it's based on what we know from DD's history.
For example:
One recent mystery reaction started at the end of a play that we saw-- me, DD, and her boyfriend. This was kind of vague/nonspecifically "allergic" initially, as it presented as lower-GI/pelvic PAIN. So, in the hotel room, she, her boyfriend, and I walked it backwards-- when did the pain start? Was it always this intense, or did it escalate? Period pain? (no) Mittelschmertz? (no again-- timing all wrong for either). Benadryl helped
enormously-- heat and ibuprofen did NOT. Those answers led me to begin walking backwards in time as I became convinced that it
was allergy-related...
Did she touch anything leaving the theater? No-- her hands were in her pockets, and she washed them upon returning to the hotel, and hadn't eaten in hours.
Did she touch anything IN the theater? Perhaps-- arm-rests? floor to pick up her program/epipens?
Did the production use fake smoke? (meh... MAYbe? but this reaction didn't present as asthmatic at all-- and that is almost beyond belief if that were the route of exposure)
When is the last time she ate or drank anything?-- intermission, bottled water, maybe a couple of Altoid mints from the (fresh!) tin in my purse
Where did that water come from? Boyfriend went and got it from concession in theater lobby.... aha!!
What else do they sell? Nuts? (YES! ding-ding-ding-ding-ding!!-- this is why we think that this one in particular was probably an ingestion of residue-- it was too 'big' a reaction to have been from the theater seat, or from me having contaminated the Altoid tin from a similar kind of residue pick-up on MY hands... so it was a more concentrated source-- and it probably wasn't one of the three of us, since we'd all been VERY conscientiously nut-free for the entire weekend and then some)
Does that help?
Now I'll go back and re-read your entire post to see if I'm on the right track here.
Topic: Mystery Reactions (Read 2677 times)
