Just a quick thing before I’m off to work (where this site is blocked)–I will not be doing any home testing; it just seems dangerous and foolish. I will be calling the allergist on my break, though.
Thanks, everyone, for your valuable input. I’ll share what we learn as we learn it.
it could be contact dermititus (sp?). as a young one, they often smear food. if he is sensitive to the food it will cause a reaction.
there is another thing… i have an odd reaction to cooked or baked carrots. i will get tingly or numb in my mouth. i don’t have the same reaction to raw carrots and can eat those by the barrel full. it could be something that is released or converted when cooked or baked with other things.
just another fun thing in your list to ask the allergist.
An INCREDIBLY bad idea. My son has a very severe walnut allergy. I am not sure when it started. I was eating mixed nuts when he was about four and he asked for some. I gave him a few and he promptly vomited everywhere. That may have been the beginning of it. We avoided nuts from then on but in the course of four more accidental exposures his reaction got stronger each time. The last, life-threatening time was standing over a teacher as he cracked a walnut to use in a craft project. My kid didn’t touch it in any way but the droplets from the cracking of the nut set him off. There is no way he could tolerate any amount at all on him for a skin test.
You don’t know if (hopefully it won’t!) or when the reaction will get this bad, but a) you don’t want it to be the day you decide to experiment and b) you don’t want to be adding to the number of exposures your kid has to his particular allergen. It seems that the more exposures the worse the reaction gets with these severe allergies.
Good luck. I know the horrible feeling of knowing there’s something out there that will make your kid sick but not knowing exactly what it is.
Hokkaido Brit, yeah, I realized about 5min after the post you quoted…ooooh, bad idea (thus the follow up post two before yours 
).
We just got back from spoiling RuffLlama silly after the trauma of the blood draw. He was such a trooper, but it was miserable for everyone. He whimpered and complained about the tourniquet, then commenced sobbing when they stuck him with the needle (and tried to pull it out). He didn’t freak and flail the way I feared, but did look me right in the eye and sob “Mommy! Mommy! Mommmmmmy!” Ouch, my aching heart. 
After they got four vials of blood from him (DeathLlama: “Is he going to have any left?”), he got his stickers and left clinging, sniffling, and whimpering. We then took him to a fast food place that has an indoor playground, and he got to climb and run around in between bites of chicken before going home for ice cream. We all feel better now (adults had ice cream, too).
By the way, it doesn’t appear to be tomato. He had a little ketchup tonight with no ill effect.
The appointment with the allergist is February 9, and the results from the blood test will be in next week. Until then, it’s wait, watch, and hope we never see that reaction again.
Oh, poor all of you! I do know how you feel - “Here, hurt ME, not him!” I am glad that ice cream made it a bit better for all concerned.
Allergies can be funny- starting at about age 14 ,if my son lets raw fruit touch his lips, his lips start to tingle and swell and he gets hives around his mouth. No problems with canned fruit, or if he makes certain that raw fruit doesn’t touch his lips.
Some of his cake was tinted blue, and yellow. It was a “moon and stars” theme. My son got the moon off the cake to eat, so his piece only had white frosting on it. I still think it may have been the oil. But I have never been sure. He loves frostings of all kinds now, and eats them with no problems. But we haven’t tried rubbing it all over his skin, so who knows…he may still break out from it. I just looked back at pictures from his party, but we didn’t take any of his arms after he got the welts. One shotshows the welts just starting to form, but not well I had to enlarge it to see them. I think we all freaked out a bit when it happened, so no one was running for a camera.
Ketchup isn’t as acidic as canned, stewed tomatoes. I’m okay with jarred tomato sauces, ketchup, and fresh tomato, but when using canned tomatoes at home, I’ve had trouble with the product (not hives, but it causes some rawness in my mouth, stomach ache, and sometimes joint aches the following day). It could be the source or processing of a specific ingredient makes a difference.
This is not a diagnosis or suggestion for course of action, this poster is not a qualified medical adviser for anything living, inanimate, reanimated, or ectoplasmic.
Ketchup doesn’t tend to travel with the rough crowd that lot of tomato-based products do spice or herb-wise either, so don’t take that as a sign that all tomato products are going to be okay based on ketchup not bothering him. You need to take a close look at ingredients until you narrow down the list of suspects. For example, the only commonly available spaghetti sauce that doesn’t have basil in it is a few varieties of Hunts. Whatever “sauce” Chef Boyardee uses for ravioli doesn’t have it either, but I suspect that it’s basically tomato soup with small bits of ground beef mixed in.
Not sure if anyone’s mentioned this, but there is a difference between an actual ALLERGY and a SENSITIVITY.
I have Oral Allergy Syndrome, which ironically, should be called Oral Sensitivity Syndrome. 
Along with my lifelong hay fever, when I turned 20 I started having reactions (very itchy mouth and tongue) to many raw fruits and vegetables and tree nuts. Not fun! But it’s nothing that will kill me, it’s just uncomfortable.
I am glad your son had blood drawn rather than the scratch testing. My little girl takes after me physically in most ways, and her doctor is concerned that her occasional asthma like symptoms aren’t really asthma, they’re an allergic reaction. I’m considering allergy testing for her, and I think we will take the blood draw route as well.
I am not positive, but I think the prick/patch testing narrows down what you are actually allergic to, better than the blood draw. If not my son had both done for no good reason.
Now that they know the main culprit for him is peanuts, they just do blood draws every year or so, to check his numbers. They actually went down a tad last year, and I am praying he will be one of the few to outgrow this allergy.
BTW the prick testing on his back didn’t hurt him as much as the blood draw, but it was hard to keep him still for the 20 minutes or more that they needed to study the patches. My husband had to hold him on his lap, and keep his arms at his side. If he moved around too much he would contaminate the sites. We sang, told stories, and did every trick we could think of to pass the time and not let him move. Whew! And now for the blood draws, they numb up his arms with a cream first. He has veins like me that hide and has been poked as many as five times before they got blood. The numbing cream was awesome. Ask for that if your child needs to have blood drawn.
Numbing cream? Ooh, definitely need to look into that, in case of whatever jabbing (or pricking) that may occur in the future.
BTW, RuffLlama has separately had the same carrots, noodles, and parmesan cheese that he had in the offending meal without incident, so it is definitely something in the sauce. At least we’ve got that narrowed down.
And Cat, welts aside, that is one CUTE little kitten! I’m not a baby person, but it made me Squee! I know he’s 5 now, but still…Awwwwww.
That sounds like what happened to my son. He had pollen allergies and mild asthma since he was young, and suddenly as a teenager started having oral reactions to raw fruits. When I first happened, I started looking around, and found out that it is actually an allergy- apparently it’s some sort of cross-reaction related to pollen allergies. I even found a site with a list of which pollen allergies are associated with reactions to particular foods.
Well, that herb theory of mine may not hold…something in tonight’s dinner just set him off again, although no where near as bad as last Wednesday.
Dinner for him was simple–angel hair pasta that he’s had the last few days with no reaction, grated parmesan (“I got a LOT of cheese!”), and…canned chili. I was using it as a sort of sauce mixed with the noodles (and a stealthy way of getting fiber into him). After he ate about 3/4 of his itty bitty serving, I noticed he started scratching his hands, and those…things around his mouth brightened. I watched for the face rash and thankfully it never really appeared.
Poor RuffLlama started crying a bit from the discomfort, though–we took away his noodles and said we’d get him oranges, and he whimpered, “Yeah, I want oranges make my hands feel better!” DeathLlama took him straight to the bathroom to wash his hands (so we could see what was red, and what was sauce), and they were indeed swollen and blotchy red. We took a few pictures, and DeathLlama is off dumpster diving to get the chili cans out of the recycle bin.
Now, once the food was removed, the reaction faded quickly. It never got as bad as the other night and did not require an antihistimine.
So…maybe that tomato allergy is more likely than I was thinking. Gotta see what the herbs are in the canned chili, too.
Okay, well that’s lame–both cans of chili just say “spices” rather than specifying which spices.
Just grabbed a can of the tomato sauce I used the other night and compared it with the cans of chili. Shared ingredients are:
If it’s not the anonymous spices, maybe it is the tomato. It would be in much higher concentration (obviously) in a tomato sauce than in chili, so perhaps that’s why the reaction wasn’t as severe…? Whatever it is, I think I’m going to keep him away from things tomato-sauce-ish until we get those blood test results (sometime this week, presumably).
Oh you poor things!
My first thought was tomato. It’s a fairly common allergen. Maybe that ketchup had so little actual tomato it wouldn’t cause a reaction?
The only spices that would commonly be shared between Italian and Tex-Mex would be oregano or possibly red pepper. Maybe that will help narrow it down.
Could be. MY tomato allergy is a lot like that. Sometimes I’ll get a rash from contact, sometimes not. Allergic reactions aren’t always 100% consistent (my sensitivity varies with my menstrual cycle, although obviously that is not a factor with a male toddler)
You’ll have a few anxious weeks while this all gets sorted out. Once it is, you’ll know what to avoid and mealtimes will become more relaxed again.
Odd question- was your child raised on soymilk formula?
I had a tomato allergy growing up, too. Not as bad as your kid’s allergy sounds, but I definitely broke out in red painful rashes around my mouth.
The bad side was that all my brother was willing to eat was spaghetti, so my mom ended up making a lot of two-variety meals. The good side is that I grew out of it completely after a few years.
I’ve had an allergy to eggplant since babyhood, which, while weird, isn’t that difficult to avoid (though it made being a vegetarian in college a little more difficult). Eggplant, tomato, peppers, potato - all nightshades, and I can see how tomato could easily be an allergy. My allergy manifests (in the rare instances that I get exposed to eggplant) in a red, itchy rash around my mouth and itchy tongue. Luckily, I’m not allergic to any other nightshades.
I hope you figure out what your son’s issue is without much more incident! Allergic reactions are no fun.
