A woman, who suffered with blisters and welts all over her body during her pregnancy, has revealed she is 'allergic' to her own baby.?
Fiona Hooker, from Hampshire, England, first noticed itchy red areas on her stomach at 31 weeks pregnant, while carrying her son Barney, The Mirror reported.?
As time went on,?the allergies became worse. And once?she gave birth they?turned into painful blisters,?making it painful to even hold her new baby.?
Doctors diagnosed Fiona with a rare autoimmune pregnancy condition known as Pemphigoid Gestationis. She was told that a reaction to a gene in her son¡¯s DNA probably caused her immune system to attack her own skin.??
"I got a few tiny, really itchy marks around my belly button that felt like nettle stings.?I went to the doctors after a few days because it was getting more and more itchy and unbearable.?They gave me some steroid creams which didn¡¯t really touch it and it was getting bigger ¨C my belly was covered in red, itchy plaques,"?Fiona was quoted as saying by The Mirror.?
"It was the third GP I went to see that said it looked like the condition Pemphigoid Gestationis and he referred me to a dermatologist who gave me the strongest steroid cream you can get.?It was like I was allergic to my own baby," she added.?
However, Fiona didn¡¯t suffer from the condition in her first pregnancy with three-year-old daughter Phoebe.
"The doctors think it might be to do with the baby ¨C something in the father¡¯s DNA triggers the placenta to start attacking a protein which is also in the skin ¨C so my body was attacking my skin. My son must have a gene from his dad that my daughter got from me instead, because I didn¡¯t have it with my first pregnancy," she said.?
The condition, it is being said, only affects one in 50,000 women.??
The problems, however,?continued after her son was born.
After giving birth to Barney, on June 13 2021, Fiona¡¯s skin erupted into blisters that covered her stomach, thighs, arms and chest ¨C which made holding her newborn very painful.
"After I¡¯d given birth it just exploded and turned into blisters.?If I scratched it, it felt good and temporarily took the itch away but obviously I was removing the blisters and skin so then I was left with raw, really painful skin and the blisters just came back on top of that.?It hurt a lot to even hold my son so I wasn¡¯t really able to enjoy the newborn stage because of it," she said.?
After six months,?the symptoms finally started to subside, but she still has to use steroid creams from time to time.?
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