As I’ve mentioned many times before, Captain Jelly Belly has several food allergies. He’s allergic to eggs, fish, peanuts, and tree nuts. When he has even a trace amount of any of these foods, he produces spectacular multi-coloured vomit, which lands in a puddle on the floor spelling out, “I’m allergic, you idiot.” Often times he’ll get a cluster of a few hives as well, maybe on one arm or a leg or on his face. It’s a clear cut, fast reaction.

His relationship with milk, however, has never been as obvious. He doesn’t have an acute reaction to it, and it doesn’t turn up a positive result on his allergy tests. But we’re his parents, we know him, and we can tell that milk bothers him. This kind of mystery reaction is known in the industry as a “sensitivity,” code for, “your parents are imagining it, kid.”

When we were kids, my youngest sister, LittleSis, had one ear infection after another. Finally someone suggested to my mother to take her off of cow’s milk, and give her goat’s milk instead. It may have just been a coincidence, but LittleSis’s battles with ear infections ended, and she was a much happier child. She drank goat’s milk until she was an adult, but occasionally my mom would cave in and let her have a little pizza or ice cream with the rest of the kids. This indulgence almost always led to my mother declaring, later in the day, “LittleSis, I CAN TELL YOU’VE HAD MILK.”

When we started to suspect something was up with the Captain and milk, I asked my mom what she meant by the you’ve-had-milk statement. She said that whenever LittleSis had milk, she got really cranky. I was like, “Cranky? This is your definitive list of symptoms? All these years you never gave her cow’s milk because she was cranky? Like you never thought — just maybe — she’s a kid?” So I discounted it.

But now, we’re dealing with the same sort of nebulous symptoms that leave doctors and other parents thinking we are nuts. First of all, if he has milk on a regular basis, he wakes up screaming at night. It’s like a night terror, in that he screams uncontrollably for up to an hour at a time, and is completely unable to talk to us or communicate in any way. These events used to happen maybe five or six times a week, and every time, we’d completely freak out. But over time, we’ve learned that they are directly tied to his intake of milk. Too much milk, especially late in the day, and he’ll have a night scream incident. No milk, no screaming. No one can explain the link, but we’ve seen it happen too many times to discount the empirical evidence.

And yes, when the Captain has had too much milk…he gets cranky. Not his usual brand of too-tired, too-hungry cranky. It’s some bizarre, mutant-man cranky that is completely unlike his real personality. Every thing that we ask him to do is unbearably hard. Every small correction we make — asking him to hang up his hat, for example, or put down his car to come to dinner — results in uncontrollable crying. He’ll start hitting Gal Smiley for no reason at all, or randomly throwing toys. We know him too well to say that this is just a phase, or boy behaviour, or him being tired. He’s not himself. It’s like the milk is putting a stress on his body, and while his body deals with the intruder, he can’t handle any other form of pressure or stimulus. It’s too much, and he has a breakdown.

We’ve asked our allergist about milk, but since it doesn’t turn up on the test, he can’t help us. He thinks it’s a lactose intolerance, but I doubt it. Babies born lactose intolerant can’t stomach breast milk (since it has lactose in it, too), so within two months of birth, you have a serious, obvious, noticeable problem on your hands in terms of a screaming baby who won’t nurse, and we didn’t have that with the Captain.

Lately we’ve been speculating a lot as to what the root cause of this sensitivity is. We think maybe there is some additive in milk, or maybe something that they feed the cows, that bothers the Captain. A while ago suggested that goat’s milk worked for my mom with LittleSis because a lot of goat’s milk is organic (goat’s milk buyers being of the crunchy granola crowd, in general), and so maybe did not have as many additives in it as regular milk. An interesting idea. We’d love to know what the trigger is, both to better help our son, and so that we could perhaps find some milk products that are safe for him, because sadly, he LOVES milk, loves the cheese, loves the ice cream, loves anything milk-related. He’s always begging us for milk and it’s so sad when we have to say no.

Over the past few months we’ve been experimenting with lactose-free milk, on his cereal at breakfast, and it has been going okay. Usually he can have it for four or five days in a row before he starts showing signs of the uber-crank, and we can tell a nighttime scream is on the way, so we have to take a two or three day break. But it’s something. Last week they didn’t have the usual lactose-free brand we had been using, so I had to get a different brand, and on day one, I could tell something was up. He was NOT HAPPY. So…one brand okay, one brand not okay. Interesting.

Yesterday at the Superstore I thought to myself, “What if…this is crazy, I know…but what if, my mother actually knows something about raising kids? What if she is on to something with this goat’s milk thing?” So I bought a carton of goat’s milk.

And we gave it to Captain Jelly Belly on his cereal this morning.

And about 10 minutes later, he threw up. Definitely an obvious allergic reaction.

So…maybe this is progress? It wasn’t organic goat’s milk (at least, it wasn’t labelled as such), so who knows what kind of things might have been fed to the cows (I’ve heard stories on the internet — probably totally bogus — of farmers feeding colourants and other chemicals to the cows to affect the colour and texture of the milk, things that end up in the milk but do not need to go on the label). We now have a sampling of brands, some of which kind of work and some of which do not work at all. Maybe someday we’ll figure it all out.

In the meantime, we’re going to take him in for an allergy re-test to see if anything new — including milk — shows up. I hope we can narrow it down, because being able to give the Captain a big bowl of ice cream is a real fantasy of mine. And his, I’m sure.