Epi Pens and ERs

Thankfully Bee doesn't have many ER visits.  However, her most recent ER visit was in December of last year.  That was not a fun day.

Bee was spending the day with her grandparents at a local hotel.  They were eating at a restaurant in the hotel where they know the chefs.  They always prepare gluten free oatmeal for Bee.  This day they were eating in a different dining room but should have been eating the same food.

For this special day it was meet Santa during breakfast and the kids were very excited.  Not long after eating, Bee began to get itchy and rashy.  She was sneezing and coughing.  When my dad took a close look at her, he could see that her eyes were beginning to swell.  He called me to tell me what was happening as he took her back to their hotel room to give her some Benadryl.

That's when her eyes began to swell shut.  I told him to give her the Epi pen right away and that I would be at the hotel in a few minutes to take her to the ER. 

When I arrived he rushed her out to me and I quickly put her in the car to drive to the ER where my husband was waiting for me.  I ran in as the nurses opened the door and put her directly into a room to start an IV line with Benadryl and steroids.  Her entire face was swollen and puffy and her eyes were almost swollen shut.

I spent the next 4 hours watching her sleep as the swelling slowly came down and her breathing became calm and steady.  It took 3 days for all the swelling to finally disappear.

The worst part of our ER visit was that we have no idea what caused her reaction.  We can only assume that the hotel must have cross-contaminated her food or prepared something incorrectly.  But we will never know what it was.

So now I worry that there could be another allergy that I don't know about yet.  Or maybe it's just because people were not as careful as they should have been.