Scratching Season

E has started to scratch. Nobody else seems to be sniffling or sneezing or watering at the eyes yet, but E is scratching.

When E was a baby, she was one of those ear infection kids. One after another after another, from about six to eighteen months, she was almost never without a cold or an ear infection. The funny thing was, they never hurt her. The way I could tell was that her eyes would get bright and her cheeks red, and once she was old enough, she would start to scratch. Eventually the ear infections stopped, but the colds continued, and, always, the first sign of an oncoming cold was the scratching.

"Allergies," my mom and stepfather kept saying, "allergies."

"Allergies?" I asked my pediatrician.

"We don't screen for allergies until they're three," he replied.

Cut to three-year-old E, still scratching.

So we did some fancy new allergy panel that screens for everything. E came out with antibodies (antibodies? anti-allergens? I don't know, whatever it is they test for) ten times normal. Normal was something like 128 and E was 1280. And the screen said that she was only allergic to corn and crab. I don't think so. E loves corn on the cob, but we don't have it that often, and if crab has ever passed that girl's discerning lips, it hasn't been on my watch.

My mom was suspicious. "1280? That's exactly ten times 128. Maybe it was a lab error."

"Maybe it was a lab error," I said to the pediatrician.

"Good point," said the pediatrician, "maybe it was a lab error."

So they ran the numbers again. 1280. We ran another test, the old-fashioned one. 1280. No question the girl was super-allergic, but she still wasn't testing positive for any of the standard allergens.

This is where I love my pediatrician, even if he comes off a bit slow in the dialogues above.

"Look," he said, "she's obviously allergic. The next step would be skin testing, and she would hate it, and then the next step would be medication and we don't want to go there unless we have to. So why don't you just try to eliminate allergens from her life, and treat the symptoms."

So we took the rug out of her room, and we tried to wash her sheets more often, and we sprayed her with Benadryl Spray (which I'm almost tempted to write a blog ad for, it works that well), and then it was winter and she stopped scratching, and we didn't worry about it.

But now it's spring, and she's scratching again. We washed her sheets yesterday, and I cut her nails, and I've offered her the Benadryl Spray, but she's not ready to go there. She woke up in the middle of the night scratching, and I got in bed with her to help her fall back asleep, and we both lay there awake for what seemed like forever while she scratched and I gently tried to stop her. But given my own sensitive skin, I know the pain of an itch and the pleasure of a scratch from way back, so I feel for her, even as I'm lying there half awake, wishing only that she would stop.

I'm not sure what the point of this post was, except to explain why I'm so tired this morning and to generate sympathy for poor itchy E, who will probably be scratching for the next six months.