The strange case of the woman who is allergic to her son
The mother of the baby will have to maintain treatment with steroid creams for the rest of her life.
At the end of 2020, Fiona Hooker became pregnant with her second child, after his birth she realized that she is allergic to it.
Fiona says that during two trimesters of the pregnancy there were no problems. With two months to go before giving birth, red spots began to appear on her stomach.
Hooker in an interview with South Wets News Service, commented that she went to the doctor days after the red spots began to appear, since she could not stand the itching.
Then, little by little , red blisters began to appear all over her body. At this time, the doctors offered her a diagnosis which was very painful for her.
Fiona assures that during pregnancy she felt the spots as if they were stings from the green grass, nettle.
After eight months of pregnancy, the severity of the hives worsened and the woman rushed to the hospital.
At that time, the specialists prescribed steroid creams to attack the hives, but they were unable to reduce the severity of the symptoms.
Over the course of four days, she was treated with oral steroids, which failed to eliminate the odor, only calmed it down.
In June of last year, it was the arrival of her second son, whom he named Barney. With the birth, her health problems began to worsen.
The woman assured that blisters appeared on her arms, on her chest, on her belly and anywhere that she had contact with the baby, making this experience difficult.
Hooker already had a three-year-old daughter, Phoebe, and had no problems with that pregnancy, causing some confusion for the doctors.
Following Barney's birth, Fiona was diagnosed with pemphigoid gestationis. This is an autoimmune disorder which is caused by a woman's immune system being able to generate antibodies and in doing so attacking her own skin.
The cause of this is still unknown. It is considered that it could have something to do with the baby. Fiona added that it could have something to do with the father's DNA causing the placenta to attack a protein that also exists in the skin and therefore attacking its own skin.
Still, the 32-year-old hoped this was a mistake and hoped she would be diagnosed with something else.
In order to treat it, you must use steroid creams throughout your life, as you may have smaller flare-ups in the future. Because of this, the woman has decided not to have any more children.
Only one in 50,000 pregnant women are affected by this disorder.