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Alejandra DeVargas said she will not soon forget her first encounter with food allergies.
When her second son, Vincent was eight months old, DeVargas said she decided to start introducing him to solid foods.
“I gave him just a tiny bit of an egg and about 10 minutes after that, he started getting hives all over his body,” she recalled. Eventually, his eyelids started swelling up to where his eyes were closed. And so we took him to the emergency room right away.
After the panicked trip to the hospital, she and her husband were referred to a pediatric food allergist, who saw them six months later. There Vincent’s food allergy was confirmed and the DeVargas family began down the road of treating their youngest son’s allergies.
Since then Alejandra DeVargas has become an advocate for Food Allergies. She and her sons, Vincent and his older brother Eric, were recently honored with a pair of proclamations., the most recent coming at the Los Lunas Village Council meeting on Thursday, April 8 – just in time for this week’s national commemoration of Food Allergy Awareness Week, May 11-17. The DeVargases were also honored by the New Mexico State Legislature during the recent sessions in Santa Fe.
Looking back on Vincent’s first time at the hospital, she said, is a reminder of the life-and-death stakes she and her sons are trying to get the word out about.
“Obviously that (experience) was scary and very terrifying,” she said. “It’s a lot more common than a lot of people realize.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 6.2 percent of adults in the U.S. and 5.8 percent of children have food allergies – which translates to around 16 million adults and 4 million children. The most common food allergens include milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, wheat, soy, sesame, fish, and shellfish.
In Vincent’s case, eggs, peanuts, and tree nuts were the first allergies doctors confirmed after a battery of tests that he was allergic to. She also got another scare just two days before the doctor’s appointment.
“My older son, Eric, had left out a peanut butter cracker wrapper, and the little one was already pulling himself up, and all that, and so he went, and he reached for the wrapper,” she said. “I guess he put his hands on it and then put it on his mouth, and then he started getting swollen lips, so then I was at that point, I was like ‘Oh, okay, there’s something else going on.’”
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Doctors did skin testing for the major allergens, about eight allergens, and also did some cautious skin testing to see how much and how fast his allergic reactions came on. After all that, including blood tests, the DeVargas family found out Vincent had severe, life-threatening food allergies.
After all that, Vincent, who is now in per-kindergarten, doesn’t go anywhere without an EpiPen, an Epinephrine autoinjector. His school nurse at Desert View Elementary, where he and Eric go to school, and where his mom Alejandra works as a school counselor.
The DeVargases have been active in getting the word out about food allergies since the beginning, Alejandra said. Beginning with social media posts from mom, they soon got involved with the “Teal Pumpkin Project,” which aims to make “Halloween a little bit more inclusive for all the kids that have food allergies, or maybe other dietary needs.”
In addition to displaying a teal pumpkin to let trick-or-treaters know they offer non-food treats, like toys, glow sticks, stickers, et cetera – and occasionally allergy-friendly treats, as advised by the website, foodallergy.org. The website also has a registry for food allergy-safe houses for Halloween.
“It’s just time to bring more awareness to this because not everybody understands the severity of food allergies,” Alejandra said, “and I know that I didn’t when I was a lot younger and without children. And so I just thought it would be great to start bringing awareness to this, which we’ve been doing for the last four years.
Adjusting to food allergies was a priority early on and Alejandra said the DeVargas household pretty much eliminated any food that might trigger an allergic reaction in Vincent.
“The first time we went shopping, it was about three hours long, because we had to look at all the food labels and all that,” she said. “We had to familiarize ourselves with what he can and cannot eat, because certain products have eggs in them, like spaghetti. We had to completely adjust our meals. And luckily, he was an infant, so he was still not eating what we were exactly eating. But yeah, we eliminated things like peanut butter, all eggs, and all that.
As Vincent became older, the family began bringing some food back into the house.
“Because in the real world, he’s gonna be exposed to those products,” she said, “and he has to learn that he can’t go and reach for that, or he can’t eat that. So we’ve been teaching him like, “Okay, these are the products that you are allergic to, you cannot eat these.”
Two years ago, Alejandra said the family found out about a program called oral immunotherapy, where doctors give patients a small amount of allergen, usually in liquid form. Over time, the amount is increased until the patient is no longer allergic to the food.
So far, Vincent has been able to get to the point where he can eat eggs again and is now working on his peanut allergy.
“We saw amazing results with the egg oral immunotherapy so we said ‘Hey, let’s go ahead and try (with peanuts),” she said. “There’s eight to 10 tree nuts, and realistically, it might not be possible for him (to get over those allergies). But we’re at least getting the ones that affect him the most.”
As for informing the community about food allergies, Alejandra said the family will keep getting the word out.
“I’m gonna keep doing that, but I wanna see if there’s anything else that I can do, especially in the school setting,” she said. “I’ve been bringing it to the attention of my district charge nurse and stuff like that. So we’re gonna see what we can do in the school setting and see if we can help out any other students who are experiencing food allergies and to try to minimize anxiety and just to help them out with all that.”
