So, here’s what happened. In my nauseous, pregnant daze in
November, I did not order Ellie’s Ketotifen refill in time. By the time I did
call to place the order, I realized it wouldn’t arrive before we were set to
leave for our holiday travels. So I had the medication shipped to my parents’
house, in the hopes that it would arrive in the window we were in the Pacific
Northwest, and not later, after we had moved on to visit family in Colorado. All
told, we were without Ellie’s Keotifen for about three weeks in December and we
were definitely feeling the pain with daily tummy aches and foods that had been
working that weren’t working anymore. But we got it back, just before
Christmas, and we were so relieved.
Then, we flew from Portland to Colorado and somewhere in
transit we lost it. We lost $200 in medication and we could not find it to save
ourselves. Ian and Ellie and I all had terrible colds and I know I was in a
major fog, and all I could do was get through the next week of travel. I had no
capacity for tracking down the Ketotifen (which is also called Zaditen). We had
left two boxes of gifts at my parents’ for them to ship to us, and we hoped
that maybe we had put the Ketotifen in there. So we spent a week in Colorado,
and then spent another week at home in LA waiting for the boxes to arrive and
when they did arrive – no Ketotifen. That’s when I really realized we were
completely screwed. So I called CanadaDrugs.com and placed a new order and was
told it would take the customary 14-21 days of shipping, but it could be toward
the long end of that spectrum, because they had changed the country they were
sourcing from.
By this point, things were really looking bad. Ellie had
only had Ketotifen for one week out of about six. She was having tummy aches
daily. In the morning the first thing she would say was, “Mama, I have a tummy
ache.” She complained of her tummy hurting all the time and I had no idea what
to do. I tried pulling back on her diet, but it had been so long (about nine
months) since this magic pill entered our lives that I didn’t even really know
where to start. I re-researched salicylate sensitivity, referred to this online
food list daily, and seriously restricted any form of her allergic foods, even
though small quantities of, say, cooked celery, had been fine in the recent
past. I learned by trial and error – again. I made too many mistakes, and Ellie
suffered. I hated it. I hated that we were back in that place. I think enough
time had passed that I really started to wonder if that bad time had ever even
happened.
