Pretty Scary

As the title would suggest, we had a pretty good scare the other night.  Last Tuesday evening Shawn and I took the girls for a little ice cream cone at the local cafe after dinner.  Shawn thought he was doing something special for Taylor when he got her a slice of their special dessert - Snickers ice cream pie.  Those of you who know her, know that Taylor has a TREE nut allergy - not peanuts.  Taylor has eaten Snickers candy bars before, as well as chunky peanut butter, regular peanuts, etc, without any problems.  Well who knows what could have been crumbled up in the graham cracker crust, because she had her usual reaction when getting tree nuts - she threw up her entire stomach contents.  We finished the rest of our cones and hopped in the truck, only to pull over a few hundred yards down the road so she could throw up again. 

By this time she was talking in a ventriloquist sounding voice, and making weird swallowing noises.  She was laughing about it, so we thought she was just being a goofball.  She said that something was stuck in her throat, but we just assumed some peanut skin or something was stuck.  When we got home, about 5 minutes later, I took Hailey up for a bath while Shawn checked Taylor's throat - not noticing anything.  Taylor, who was still talking funny, then came upstairs for bath time and was telling me her lip hurt.  I then took a look at her and noticed the left half of her upper lip was swelling.  Shawn was summoned in from outside, the EpiPen was grabbed (but not used), and Taylor was on her way to her first ER visit.

Needless to say, everything was fine.  By the time Shawn was about half way there, the swelling had started to go down and her voice started to return to normal.  He continued on to the emergency room anyways in order for her to get checked out.  Prior to this incident, Taylor has not had any tree nuts since before Hailey was born, so we don't know if her reactions are getting worse, or if it was just a product of mowing the grass with Daddy, playing with the dogs, etc.  The whole thing was fairly scary for me, and I think a little bit for Taylor too.  Shawn was most concerned about having to stab her with the EpiPen!  Taylor wasn't entirely phased by it though, as she kept asking Shawn on the way to the ER, "when are you going to stab me with that?"  "Can you poke me with that Daddy?"  If only she really knew!