One minute he's fine, the next minute, covered in hives

Poor buddy - He can't seem to catch a break here. At work today, I got a phone call from daycare today at noon. Marlienne was concerned that Ben was having an allergic reaction to something, after a lunch of macaroni and tuna and 1/4 of a peanut butter sandwich. His face was full of hives and his eye was starting to swell. I took off from work, picked Ben up and headed straight to the doctors office. They got him in right away in Immediate Care. The doc evaluated him, said yup - looks like an allergic reaction and gave him some Benedryl, and told me to keep a close eye on him. I headed out to my car and put Ben in his car seat and he proceeded to throw up all of his lunch. So, I brought him back in to the office. We tried another dose of Benedryl and a shot of a steroid, because he was getting dramatically worse - the hives had spread to his torso, legs and arms and he started wheezing a bit. He was 2 hours overdue for a nap, so we waited in the doctor's office for another hour or so while Ben slept on my chest and the nurses and his doctor checked in on us every 15 minutes or so to see how he was doing. Honestly, I was starting to get a but worried when the pediatrician on staff stopped by for a consult and exclaimed, "Wooooaaah! You weren't kidding - that rash looks horrible!" Ben's breathing had improved but the hives continued to spread. Finally, at about 4:00, we headed home where Ben slept for another hour or 2, got up to eat, then went back down for the evening at 8:00. His face looked pretty close to normal, but the rest of the body hives were still present when he went down to sleep. We picked up a Rx for baby Zantac and an Epi-pen and are to give him Benedryl for a few days. We have an appt with an allergist on Tuesday - hopefully we will do a blood draw (along with a blood draw for lead levels and a hemoglobin test - labs ordered at his 12 month appt that I haven't gotten to yet) to test to be sure it was the peanuts and not the tuna, and to see if there are any other allergies (I suspect egg whites - Ben got a few facial hives when I gave him some scrambled eggs 3 weeks ago).

I took a few shots to show the allergist what he looked like...

How sad... doesn't this look painful?

...and a nice shot of our beautiful, happy, baby boy from last weekend.