Garlic Allergy...seriously?

I'll be honest, Vance having an egg allergy was a little hard in the beginning for me, but pretty easy to get a handle on after a few weeks (that doesn't mean that it sucks less when you can't eat a cupcake everyone else is enjoying) and I just kept reminding myself that it could be worse and he could be allergic to something really tricky. Well... a few months after finding out about the eggs I was busy doing something and put Vance in his high chair to give him a snack and mostly keep him contained. I handed him a garlic and onion cracker (an accidental buy at the store from our normal plain salt ones that he liked) and I noticed that he was starting to ask for his drink over and over again, like he couldn't get enough, and his face became red. I was on alert, but was still confused until he started smacking his lips/mouth and coughing. At this point I knew it was a severe reaction and I needed to do something. Our pediatrician had told us to keep a bottle of Benadryl on hand and dump it down his throat if something like this happened and I did just that. Luckily, that seemed to work and everything started to calm down. I called our allergist's office and talked to the nurse who informed me that it was an anyphylactic reaction and I should give him an epinephrine injection, to which I explained we didn't have. She scheduled us for an appointment a few days later.

This was taken after everything calmed down, about 20 minutes after onset.

I went and did what any normal, sane, mother would do: I called the store the cracker came from, got in touch with the distributor of the cracker, and even talked to the head of quality control in the manufacturing plant and demanded to know why eggs was not listed as an ingredient (which is mandatory) or a "may contain traces" ingredient (which is voluntary) on the package of crackers. My worst fear came true of Vance accidentally getting a trace of egg, his reaction being much worse than a rash, and us not having the correct medicine to help him. Before our appointment with the allergist, the quality control person for the cracker had called me back saying that they do not produce anything in the plant containing eggs and they went over the logs and there is no way a batch of their crackers contained even traces of egg. Me being the sane person I am thought they were a bunch of liars. I even looked into sending that box of crackers to a lab out of the University of Nebraska to test for traces of egg.

We went to our allergist appointment and told the nurse practitioner what had happened and gave all the cracker details. She told us that the "spice" of the cracker could have just irritated his mouth and that's why he was asking for water and everything else and she didn't think we needed to test for other allergens. Matt and I insisted that she test for garlic, onion, and sesame seed (a rising food allergen in the US) and she finally conceded, but told us that she was confident nothing would come up. We did the skin test and garlic came up immediately. When she came back in the room she told us to forget anything she had just said and that he is severely allergic to garlic based on the test and his previous reaction. We were also informed that she had never seen a garlic allergy before and it was so rare to have an anaphylactic reaction to it that there was simply no data on whether he will outgrow it or not, but it doesn't look promising. (Of course!)

Matt and I also started to think back to times when we would give Vance something and his mouth would get red, but we couldn't figure out why. We chalked it up to possibly having traces of egg or just be irritating to his sensitive skin. We now believe that if we could go back and check labels, all of those foods would have garlic in it. And remember the eggs that Vance had right after his birthday that caused such a strong reaction? You guessed it, it had garlic in it. With him actually having an egg allergy, we just assumed that was the cause of the reaction and didn't look into it further.

We now have an epinephrine auto-injector that must be carried around with us at all times. Not in the car when we are in a store, not in my bag in a locker at the water park, but in my hands at all times. We have to assume that even the smallest amount of garlic will send him into anaphylaxis and we have to be prepared for that.

On one hand I feel relieved, we know what caused that reaction, but on the other hand, it is devastating. How are we going to handle this and more importantly, how will Vance handle this when he's older?