Reccent RPA appointment

I had a appointment this week with the RPA allergy unit, It was great as I didn't have to go to Sydney to have the appointment, It was done by a "tele health" appointment. What is that you ask?

Its basically a Skype call, you can have a "tele-health" appointment if you are a certain distance from the city. Its very helpful especially for rural and remote people, I'm only around 150 km from my doctor but my daughter is 1850 km for hers and tele-health is very helpful for her! Please find more information with the link below.

Tele Health is great, I didn't need to spend hours in traffic, tolls and parking. All my questions had an answer, if she didn't have an answer she found out and emailed me after the appointment.

I'm currently doing a elimination diet, I'm in week 3 of a 6 week round. It's very restrictive. The idea of the diet is eliminating unnatural and natural chemicals from the diet to try and work out what the trigger/triggers to my symptoms.

My diet currently is

• FRUIT- only pears
• VEG - Potato, iceberg lettuce, bamboo shoots, beans, bean shoots, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, celery, chives, choko, garlic, leek, mungbean sprouts, shallots and swede.
• MEAT - Chicken, lamb, Veal, Beef and rabbit.
• SEAFOOD - White fish. crab, lobster, calamiri, sea scallops, oysters and musssels.
• EGGS
• LEGUMES - Bean mixes, black eye beans, borlotti beans, butter beans, canellini beans, chick peas, haricot beans, lentils(brown,red yellow), lima beans, lupin, mung beans, red kidney beans, soup mix, soya beans, split peas(green,yellow) white beans. I also can have rice.
• NUTS & SEEDS - cashews and poppy seeds
• DRINKS - water, rice milk and vodka
• NO dairy NO Wheat or Gluten 

 Its really hard, but I'm getting use to it, Surprisingly what I'm really missing is pumpkin, salads, bananas and I would really LOVE a cup of tea.

I need to keep a food and symptom diary and hopefully by the time the 6 week diet is over I'll be symptom free, then it will be challenges. Not 100% sure what the challengers are, but I think it's a tablet with food chemicals in it and if I react, I'm intolerant to that chemical. If I'm not symptom free, I think it's a recheck of the elimination diet.  I will also need to have another scope after the 6 week diet to do biopsies and check my esophagus. So at the moment that's where I'm at, until the next time take care.

Eleanor x

http://www.health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/e-health-telehealth

Helena

Helena and I have been friends for a very long time, she is the true meaning of BFF. Her battle with allergies started when as a child, when milk was introduced, she was OK with breast milk. Like me Helena is in her mid 40's so when we were younger foods allergies were not really the norm. She unknowingly avoided both milk, breads and alike. She also suffers from hay fever, terrible hives and is allergic to keratin.

Helena lived in NSW then moved to QLD. Her allergies become so much worse once she arrived, her body reacted badly with temperatures and humidity. Helena started to become really sick her whole body would swell up, and nasty rashes would appear. She suffered with toilet issues and her glands became inflamed and swollen.  She needed to be hospitalized several times, and after some back and forwards and battles with finding the right doctor, she was finally diagnosed with dairy intolerance and gluten sensitivities. To this day she suffers terribly with food and a general feeling un-wellness.

Eleanor x

What is EoE you ask?

Eosinophilic (ee-uh-sin-uh-fil-ik) Esophagitis (EoE) is a chronic allergic/immune condition. It is an inflammation of the esophagus. It happens when a type of white blood cell (eosinophil) hangs out in the esophagus (normally there is no eosinophils in the esophagus) nothing seems to work to relieve the condition including PPI's (acid blocking medicine like nexium), until the inflammation has settled.  Currently the only treatment that helps, is to go on an elimination diet to work out the triggers and PPI treatment and steroids to help reduce the amount of eosinophil and inflammation.

 It is a relatively new disease and rare disease and there is no cure at the moment. It is  increasing with more knowledge. It can affect both children and adults, and seems to be more diagnosed with people with allergy's like rhinitis, food allergy's, asthma and eczema

It is diagnosed with an endoscopy. Biopsies are taken doing this procedure and studied for eosinophils. A specialist gastroenterologist performs the endoscopy. While there is no real exact number of eosinophils in one microscopy,  it is considered that 15 after a PPI trial is EoE while under 5 you are in remission.

If you have no treatment what can happen. (other then you could choke to death on your morning slice of toast)  it can result in permanent scarring of the esophagus. Esophageal stricture needing dilation of the esophagus.

Symptoms

• Food getting stuck on the way down
• Choking on food
• Bringing food back up
• Severe acid reflux (heartburn) that doesn't respond to PPI's

NOTE

I have no medical training and I've only known about this disease for a few months, this is my understanding of it all, and I will update the page if any of this information is incorrect. Please see your doctor for any medical advice.

Eleanor x

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eosinophilic_esophagitis
http://allergy.net.au
https://www.slhd.nsw.gov.au/rpa/allergy

And the journey begins.........

So to quickly sum up my journey with allergies it started a while ago, in primary school and it was pretty mild to be honest, just the usual hayfever and grasses problems, it was only when I hit my late teens that I started to have more problems with hayfever needing injections to control it. That settled down in my early 20's and I had my first little bundle. A beautiful baby girl, Annalise. All was well until she was about 3 weeks old and she started to get eczema, so we then started on the roller coaster ride of trying to stop flare ups, while trying to work out what could be causing it. (Side note, for anyone out there that needs to put cold wraps on their baby my heart goes out to you, this was horrible because she hated them being done) We also had well meaning people giving us advice on what to do, which made it even more confusing because at the end of the day we just wanted to give our baby girl relief. So we ended just listening to the doctors. We did the usual diet elimination, which didn't work. When Annalise was finally old enough we were able to do testing and get more help. When Annalise was first diagnosed the doctors told us when she was little that she will grow out of it, she never did. Annalise is now in her early 20's and still struggles with it, so far she has had several operations, with more to come. She is allergic to large amounts of things, even toothpaste, and battles with staph infections, scarring, changes in skin pigmentation, constant changing of creams because her body would get "use to" the treatment so we would have to try another way. Annalise is allergic to large amounts of things. But despite this horrible disease, she is a strong independent women and never lets it get in her way.

My allergies got worse around my 40's (as if turning 40 wasn't enough haha) I started to get more rashes, skin crawling feeling etc etc then I had big reaction which landed me in emergency while on holidays!!! Creams, oral steroids etc etc, after a couple more trips to emergency, I spoke to my doctor, who was useless I have to say (blog coming up about doctors grrr!!!) so I battled on trying to work out what was going on, then the my body decided to step it up and I started to have really nasty reflux, went on nexium. When it didn't work I was really annoyed, then excessive burping and the other end started happening. Then my throat started to tighten, and eventually it started to completely close up and I started to choke. Scary stuff!! Again go to the doctor and he said that it will be OK and its probably related to my exercise asthma (seriously!!). Well it started to get really bad and I went to another Doctor, he sent me straight away to have an gastroscopy. I'll summarize after a couple of scopes I was diagnosed with EoE  (I'll explain this in a later post). Which basically brings me to now.

Eleanor x

First Blog Ever

Hi, this is my 1st ever blog, so please forgive any mistakes I make in this one and in the coming weeks. Firstly and most importantly, I do not have any medical training, other then first aid so I could try and break a rib while quietly singing "staying alive" or put a pooh bear band aid on your "boo boo" that's about it, so please refer to your doctor for any medical questions. This is only my family friends and my experience with EoE and allergies and to be honest, some cheap venting.

Eleanor x