Sleuthing Again

DH and the older girls have been sick, but finally seem to be on the mend now.

Baby E, after feeling great for the last several days, woke up this morning feeling miserable.

She had a rash on her cheeks, was extraordinarily grumpy and out of sorts, and kept wailing and crying in a hoarse, choky voice. I noticed that her face was slightly puffy (especially around her eyes), but not enough to be sure it wasn't from having just woken up. She was wheezing so much that I was worried she was having trouble breathing, and occasionally coughing too.

Since DH and the girls have had bad colds, I thought she might be coming down with the same thing. But she didn't have the fever the others had with it.

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By late morning, E was perfectly fine. She still had a bit of a stuffy nose, just slightly worse than the very mild stuffiness she's had for the last week or two. But she was in a great mood and feeling fine, with no hoarseness or wheezing. Her face rash was back to the barely-there state that's been her norm lately.

What's really strange is that the same thing happened last Tuesday morning. The congestion wasn't as bad and the rash and moodiness were worse and lasted longer, and took longer to build up, but it was a very similar occurrence.

Last week I thought it must be the Kosher for Passover margarine causing the reaction, but she hasn't had that since last week.

I've been racking my brain trying to figure out what was in common between last Monday/Tuesday and this one, and finally I did figure out one thing: latex balloons. The kids played with latex balloons last Monday, and then again last night.

I thought I had gotten rid of all the balloons in the house. I'd noticed that they were a possible factor in several of E's mystery reactions, and had read they were dusted with cornstarch, so I popped the ones I could find and threw them away. But I didn't communicate that with DH, so when he found a couple of balloons behind the couch, he gave them to the kids to play with.

There are a number of other things that could be the cause (for instance, we've been starting to trial new foods on Fridays, so a delayed reaction could be kicking in Monday or Tuesday). But the latex balloon theory was an interesting one. There certainly was a lot of white powder on the insides of these two balloons when I popped them to throw them in the trash today.

In addition to the corn angle, there's the latex possibility. Especially since she reacts to several foods that are commonly cross-reactive with latex.

But either the cornstarch or the latex should cause a more immediate reaction than that, I would think. So that makes me wonder about something like dust mites in her bedding.

Of course, it's possible that part of the wheezing was the "worse-in-the-morning" effect of a cold. But the fact that she hasn't been waking up like that except for a day or two last week when she was having a reaction seems more than a coincidence. We'll see what happens tomorrow morning.

The new addition of wheezing to E's set of reaction symptoms is worrisome, if that's really what's happening.

It's so hard trying to figure out this stuff.