Our little miracle and how his story began...

We were excited to welcome our fourth child, Elijah Hunter, in May 2006. But within just a few short weeks after he was born we began to realize that Eli was even more special than we had ever had imagined.

It became apparent by age 3 weeks that Eli was going to have serious health challenges although we were not able to get our pediatrician on board with that mind set for another year. Eli was born at 38wks and weighed in at 8lbs 5oz, so he was off to a great start but by the time we brought him home from the hospital he was down to almost 6lbs. The doctors weren't overly concerned mostly because he just didn't seem to be able to grasp the concept of nursing or taking to a bottle.

He did begin to eat well but immediately began to have difficulty breathing, colic and projectile vomiting and developed an upper respiratory condition that modeled the symptoms of RSV (although the test for RSV was negative), Eli was started on medications for reflux and then placed on an antibiotic.

The next few weeks set the stage for what would become Eli's "way of life". He began to have chronic ear and sinus infections every 3 1/2 weeks (I could literally mark my calendar) and the first time that he was given his immunizations he had a horrible reaction (his whole head and face swelled twice it's size, difficulty breathing and extreme lethargy). The doctor insisted that it was not a reaction to the vaccines. Three weeks later after he was given the next "round" of vaccines the same response as he had before happened again. The pediatrician dismissed it again. I knew that he would no longer be getting these vaccines because I knew something was wrong with Eli and I trusted my instinct as a Mom.

By age 1, Eli had been in the ER numerous times for "asthma" type symptoms, swelling of the lip, face, throat etc with unexplained hives and still his pediatrician refused to diagnose him with asthma or investigate the possibility of environmental and food related allergies.

Just after his first birthday he had scrambled eggs for breakfast and immediately was rushed to the emergency room because this time he had the most severe allergic reaction we had seen yet. Eli had went into anaphylactic shock and his airway had swelled and he was covered from head to toe with large hives. His eyes swelled shut, lips, nose and ears were swollen as well. He was violently vomiting and had extreme difficulty breathing. The vomiting had proved to be a good thing as it got rid of a lot of the allergen that was causing the reaction but the vomiting also caused a major reaction to anything it touched on his skin and further irritated his already swollen airway.

The pediatrician then decided we would need to take Eli to the Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis to have a series of allergy testing, etc. completed.
I was relieved that they were finally going to listen to me and find out what exactly was wrong with him.