‘I’m Allergic To My Own Baby’: Rare Disorder Causes Mom To Suffer From Blisters
A new mother is speaking out after she broke out in blisters during her pregnancy says she was left shocked when she learned she was “allergic” to her own baby.
Fiona Hooker, from Hampshire, England — got pregnant with her second child towards the end of 2022.
She shared that her first two trimesters were going very well. But then she started to see red spots all over her stomach just 2 months before the baby was due. “I went to the doctor after a few days because they were getting more and more itchy and unbearable,” Hooker expressed to South West News Service in an interview.
The pregnant mom explained the spots felt like “nettle stings.” Medics prescribed her a span of steroid creams, but it didn’t seem to help much. “It was like I was allergic to my own baby,” Hooker devastatingly remembered.
Once she hit eight months into her pregnancy she said she was rushed to the emergency room because the blisters have become so bad.
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“I couldn’t bear it [the pain] . . . they gave me four days of oral steroids which really helped calm it down,” she shared.
“I exploded into blisters on my tummy, chest, arms and legs,” the mom stated. “Everywhere you would hold a baby. It was quite difficult.”
Once she arrived to the hospital she was told she was diagnosed with pemphigoid gestationis — an autoimmune disorder “caused by a woman’s immune system producing autoantibodies and mistakenly attacking her own skin.”
“They think it might be to do with the baby,” she explained. “Something in the father’s DNA triggers the placenta to start attacking a protein which is also in the skin, so my body was attacking my skin.”
She added: “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.”