Dealing with Food Allergies and Anxiety During Pregnancy and the Postpartum Period

When I opened up my IG stories to “ask me anything” about pregnancy, labour, and delivery with food allergies, there were some very common questions. Are you worried your kids will have food allergies? Are you worried you will develop more allergies? Will you be altering your diet to prevent food allergies? Does the thought of your kid having food allergies make you not want to have kids?

I have no answer for some of these questions. I think they are indications of the fear that people feel towards babies and food allergies. Food allergy life is knowing that nothing is certain, but chugging along anyways, doing the best you can.

Food Allergies

I was often asked whether I omitted certain foods, or ate more of certain foods, during my pregnancy in the hopes that it would reduce my baby’s chances of having food allergies. The very short answer is: no! We don’t know enough about how what we eat impacts our baby’s chances of developing allergies, and there is no evidence that eating more or less of something during pregnancy has any effect. So why would I alter my diet? I saw a nutritionist who helped me determine an eating plan that would benefit my gut health as my eczema flare ups were out of control, but that is the extent of playing around I did with my diet. I ate as much as I needed each day, until I was full, which often felt like a bottomless pit of food. I avoided trying new foods, eating in restaurants, and eating food prepared in other people’s homes, as these felt like avoidable risks. Ontario was under lockdown for a good chunk of my pregnancy, which made avoiding these situations much simpler.

I discussed my food allergy concerns with my OB in detail, including what would happen if I were to have an anaphylactic reaction to medication (or to anything, really) during labour, and how that would impact my baby’s delivery and safety.

Likewise, I had a conversation about how an anaphylactic reaction during pregnancy would impact my baby as a fetus, with my allergist. These are sobering conversations but ones that I felt necessary. I would rather confront the information even if it is unpleasant.

Enjoying a late night bowl of pasta - knowing that I was eating for myself and for baby felt like a special and important task!

Food Anxiety

Knowing that I was eating for two, and nourishing my body so it could grow a whole other person, was empowering. While I thought my anxiety might spike during pregnancy I actually found it to be at an all time low as I felt I was eating for a greater purpose, and I had removed myself from the situations that most caused me to have anxiety in the past. I went to my parents’ place for breakfast or lunch or sometimes both, at least once a week. I knew that an anaphylactic reaction could have a potentially life-altering impact on my unborn fetus, but I knew I couldn’t dwell on that information or I’d never bring myself to eat anything. At one point, in the third trimester, I was eating the same granola bars as always but noticed my mouth was itchy. I re-read the label and it was fine, and I knew there was nothing in their facility I couldn’t eat. So I decided to chalk it up to irritation. Later that day I found they had introduced peas to their production facility, and that really shook me up. I had a bunch of their products at home and promptly donated or gave them all away because it just wasn’t worth the risk of cross contact. I had another small reaction to green beans earlier on in the pregnancy, where I was so uncertain how it would play out that I had my Epi Pen ready to go if needed, but fortunately it did not go that way. I will be doing an oral challenge to green beans once we are finished breastfeeding. I think that early on in pregnancy, everything feels very hypothetical because if you don’t look pregnant and can’t feel the baby inside of you, it doesn’t yet feel real. So that helped me feel at ease for the first while, especially since it was my first pregnancy.

I brought my own food to my brother’s wedding even though the caterer was willing to make me a special allergy safe meal - I was not taking any chances!

OCD

I have a specific type of OCD that I am not yet comfortable sharing with readers, but that I developed in my preteen years in response to my many anaphylactic experiences. For me, the key to managing it has been to prevent myself from entering an OCD loop. A loop or cycle is when I can feel myself getting out of control which I know will result in a downward spiral towards avoiding food altogether, or only eating a very limited number of foods. As a pregnant person eating for the good health and nutrition of two people, I knew I had to avoid getting stuck in a loop. I slowed down my daily demands of myself, prioritized walking outside and meditating, and made sure to eat a diverse selection of foods every day. If I lay on the couch starving myself because I had got into a bad loop, it wouldn’t impact just myself but my baby too, and that would be very difficult to reconcile as a mother. There were times when I felt myself slipping but I managed to avoid entering an OCD loop for the whole pregnancy, which is the longest I have ever gone. I think it was easier now at this stage of life because I had worked very hard over the last few years to get it under control and had made major strides prior to getting pregnant. If I had been pregnant even just two years earlier, this would have been a totally different story.

Eating 3 - 5 meals per day, including a wide variety of foods that are allergy safe for me, helped me to avoid an OCD loop and kept my allergy anxiety at bay.

Metal Allergy

In my first trimester I developed an intolerance to metals. I couldn’t wear any jewelry and even found myself taking off my wedding rings for months at a time. Around the metals my skin would turn bright red and itchy, and my ears, which have three piercings each, became incredibly painful. One night as I was driving home from a friend’s house I had to pull over and remove my earrings as my ears were in so much pain it felt like they might shatter like glass. As soon as the earrings were removed I felt totally fine. Baby was in my womb making his preferences known, a dramatic little guy from the start.

Glucose Test

Aside from regular blood tests, I had a standard glucose test to determine if I had gestational diabetes, in my second trimester. Prior to the test taking place, I asked my OB to tell me in detail what in involved. She advised that I would have to drink a sugary liquid, wait, and then have blood drawn to read the sugar level. I blinked emptily at her; I would have to consume an unknown liquid?! She assured me that it had an ingredients label which I would be able to read before consuming it, which brought me great comfort. I know a woman who was allergic to the sugary drink and was allowed to bring her own sugary drink, so on the day of the test I came prepared with an army of juice boxes just in case. The nurse grabbed me a bottle of the sucrose liquid from the lab’s fridge, at which point I noticed a big pink sign overhead that read “allergy alert for glucose tests” or something along those lines. I’m paraphrasing. I asked the nurse what the allergy alert was in regards to, knowing I would not ingest the drink without getting all of the information first. She had no idea what I was talking about, and I had to ask several times before she realized there even was an allergy warning. It was for red dye, not an issue for me, so I happily accepted my vessel of sugar water and sat down to drink it. The test came back normal; I did not have gestational diabetes.

GBS

Group B Strep is a bacteria that lives in about 25% of women and they might not even know it. I am one of those women. As you have read in my post about labour and delivery, I have a lot of anxiety around medications and my allergies, and I hoped to have an entirely unmedicated birth. I tested positive for Group B Strep (GBS) a few weeks before delivery. Because of this, I had to have a penicillin IV every 4 hours during labour. You can read about the effect this had on me in my eczema post. I looked in to whether I could go without the antibiotics, but foregoing them would have been potentially dangerous for my baby so that was not an option.

In this photo you can see the pump on my hand, where the penicillin (to prevent baby from contracting the GBS bacteria) was administered every few hours throughout labour.

Histamine Reactions to Breastfeeding

Can you be allergic to your own breast milk? I have often wondered this, and people have often asked me this question. By the time I had a consult call with my allergist, late in my second trimester, my milk had already started to come in and I was fine, aside from a few leaky days out in public for which I was ill prepared. However around that time I started noticing my skin was extremely sensitive. Like, touch it a bit too firmly and the contact area would become red and raised and irritated. About two weeks after baby arrived, my skin became much more sensitive and the irritation was much more pronounced. I was covered in angry red scratches and blotches all day long. My eyes, which had been puffy since delivery, were now swollen, red, and covered in eczema, and it seemed to be getting worse. Every time I fed baby or pumped milk, I would feel cold and shivery deep inside my body, and would become so itchy it was physically painful, on the back of my head, my face, hands, legs, and around my perineal stitches. The pain was so bad that I would be curled up on my bed like a shrimp, with ice packs all over me to numb the stabbing feeling. It was exhausting, and also concerning.

I thought it was an infection, but tests showed that everything was fine, and my OB confirmed that my stitches were healing on track. After some thought she proposed that it might be a histamine reaction, tripped up by the release of oxytocin from my milk “let down” (“let down” is the term given to breast milk being released from your body). Because my body is over-histamined, it can be very reactive to things that would not cause a reaction in a “normal” body. She said it was a very difficult thing to diagnose, not much is known about it, and she had never seen it in real life before. But that the timing made sense because it aligned with when I transitioned from producing colostrum to actual breast milk. I was instructed to take antihistamines. After arriving home I had a call with my allergist who was in disbelief. He had never seen or heard of this before. We discussed which antihistamine would be safe for breastfeeding and for my allergies, and I was on my way. Although it was never confirmed 100% to be a histamine reaction, I think the fact that antihistamines clear it up is quite telling.

The reactions became less pronounced as my hormones started to normalize, and as I made some changes to my diet. Some quick research about high histamine foods revealed to me that I had a VERY high histamine diet, especially after delivery. I was eating banana, avocado, tomato, beef, fermented foods, and tons of spinach, EVERY SINGLE DAY. I would fry up an entire bag of spinach with some garlic just for a snack, daily. So I made some changes to my diet right away, favoring lower histamine foods and peppering the higher histamine foods in over the span of a week rather than eating all of them every day, or conversely, cutting them out entirely.

Now, at 4 months postpartum, I only take antihistamines on days I feel it is needed, and I take a very small dose. It takes the edge off so that I can function normally and feed baby as he needs. There is still a level of discomfort, and my skin is still overly sensitive, but it is manageable. I entertained the idea of switching from breastmilk to formula but I enjoy the time we spend together nursing too much to let it go for now. At 6 months I plan to start weaning him which will be a big relief for my body, even though I will miss our special time together.

Rhinitis

Quite frankly, I am thrilled that I had my nose job before having a baby. At least I started out pregnancy with a nose that could function and breathe normally. I developed rhinitis later on in my first trimester, and had a nose bleed nearly every day of my pregnancy after that. It became so routine; wake up, drink glass of water on nightstand, clean up nose bleed, put non-petroleum jelly on a swab and coat the inside of my nose. I had an appointment with my ENT and he confirmed that it was rhinitis and that it was not uncommon that my nose swelled up during pregnancy. Miraculously, the rhinitis and swelling was gone the day after I gave birth to my son. How about that!

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