Surprise trip to the ER

YES! It was scary! We had just gotten home from my mom's house and were getting Alden ready for bed. I found these mosquito bite looking things on his legs. We had seen them before, and we thought they were bug bites (he would only get one at a time). But this time, there were quite a few of them. We gave him a bath first and started getting him ready for bed but I kept finding more and more by minutes! We figured it was an allergic reaction to something, but we didn't have any benadryl. Some of the spots were getting bigger and bigger, and he was starting to get the swelling everywhere. Joe and I drove to the nearest grocery store with Alden, and gave him some benadryl right there in the aisle even before paying for it. By then, he had developed swelling around his neck, and it was getting worse. Because of the benadryl, he started being drowsy, and I had to make sure he was breathing because he wasn't crying. The swelling in the neck was getting worse, and we headed to the Emergency Room. Fortunately, by the time we got there, he was already getting better. Even though he was still puffed up, the swelling around his neck was going down, and his vitals were all normal. The nurses checked him in the triage. Even before we properly had the chance to see a doctor or get a room or anything, the nurses were talking suspicious amongst themselves, and we overheard (because we were in the triage room, not the waiting room) that there had been a lockdown in the waiting area. Apparently, somebody walked in the waiting room with an unknown substance, and everytime that happens, the protocol is to lock down the area until they figure out what that is. The nurses kept saying that the "unknown substance" was airborn but we shouldn't be worried.... (?) Anyway, we had to wait about half an hour for the situation to be resolved, and by then, Alden was doing much, much better. So we decided to just come home. I watched him until 3am to make sure that he was okay, and by then, he was completely normal. It was so scary because he had never been sick before.

A picture of first "bug bite" we found. We took a picture to show his pediatrician later, but we kept finding more and more, and these became really big...

Picture taken after we got back home. I was going to take some pictures at the hospital but I forgot the camera at home after taking those initial pictures. (We were in a hurry) You can kind of still see his swollen ear, and his lower half of face is swollen, too.

How his body looked like after we got home. Notice the thigh, and how red it is. It was like that all over his body, red everywhere.

So until we go see his pediatrician, we won't know what he is allergic to. He's been eating rice, broccoli, potatoes, bread, cheerios, some tofu, etc., but I'm not giving him anything besides rice until we find out what caused this reaction. Our prime suspect is almonds. Yes, we haven't really fed him almonds, but my mom gave him cheerios that night from her cereal jar, and there may have been almond bits left in the jar from previous cereal (honey bunches of oat). We'll keep everyone posted on how things turn out.