Mystery Rash

On Tuesday Derek started getting this rash all over, arms, legs, trunk, ears, neck...it would just come and go.

First we thought it was from something outside, because it first showed up not long after he was outside playing, but also just after he had ate some pancakes that I made him, which I made a little differently this time. I added in some applesauce that has cinnamon in it and I used canola oil which I had purchased to replace our vegetable oil.

We thought then maybe it was the cinnamon applesauce, that the "natural cinnamon flavoring" might be the cause.

Next we wondered if the benadryl we'd been giving him off and on for the last few days was causing some sort of adverse reaction.

Ah the fun of trying to figure out where this stuff comes from.

We gave him benadryl again Tuesday night, and his skin seemed to calm down, so we figured it was outside that caused.

Wednesday & Thursday it was back again, so now I'm worried it was the benadryl and didn't give him any.

Thankfully this morning we had our first DAN! doctor appointment. I hadn't intended to need to discuss anything, but because of the obvious symptoms we ran through all the things that might be the cause. Of course it all flared up again while we were in the office, which is a good thing, because kids never present in front of doctors when you need them too!

Doctor thinks it could be the canola oil, but to cut out both the newer foods (even though he's had cinnamon before, just not in the applesauce) go back on the benadryl and we're going to see if we can get him to drink some activated charcoal to clean out anything in his system that is causing this reaction. I'm hoping its food/gut related but if not it will be off to his pediatrician to get a handle on this.

Anyway the other point of my post was to share what I found about canola oil, I just figured it was like other oils, but switched to it because the vegetable oil I had was soy based and I try to limit soy as a good percentage of the kids with casein issues also have soy issues.

After reading this article though, I see not all oils are created equal:

The Great Con-ola from Dr Mercola's site.

And to be fair, I found this article at Spectrum Organics explaining their process to make the oil.