Monday, July 29, 2013

Allergies

So, the rule with Zim seems to be that if he really likes something, he's allergic to it, at least as far as foods go.

First, we discovered he was allergic to chicken. This was something of a hunch on my part. He'd gotten really itchy since we put him on a chicken based kibble and was starting to chew some of the fur off on his butt. His poop was bad too; it was consistently soft and, oddly, smelled like chicken. Now, obviously it smelled like poop too, but it definitely had a distinctly chickeny smell to it too and so did his pee. Seeing him itching a lot and given that smell, I figured something was off with the way his body was processing chicken so we stopped giving him chicken and he got better.

Then he got demodex and his allergies sprang up. We've spent months dealing with those on and off. We've gone through a whole food trial, and he did get better with it, but he's still itchy so we're pretty sure he has environmental allergies. We tried antihistamines for that but they didn't seem to help. Eventually we're thinking we'll start him on allergy shots but since he's not really suffering (no fur coming off or anything), we figure we'll wait on that until we're getting income again (we're currently studying for the bar and will be starting fellowships in September).

Anyway, we also started introducing foods back into his diet to see if he's allergic. As part of this, we switched his food to Merrick's grain free pork food because we wanted to get him off the expensive allergy food. We knew that it had a lot of new stuff in it but we figured that if he reacted to it, we could narrow down what exactly it was that he was allergic to in it later because it would almost certainly be one of the protein sources (pork and salmon) or possibly the sweet potato. Well, he did react. Within a week he became super itchy and his poop never firmed up. Well, we've switched his food again, this time to Taste of the Wild Pacific Stream (fish based) and already things seem better. So, it looks like he's allergic to pork as well as chicken.

Here's the thing: pork and chicken are Zim's two favorite proteins. He loves chicken especially but he's also quite fond of pork. It's tragic, really. I hate seeing him not be able to have things he likes because of allergies but obviously I don't want him to be super itchy either.