When Caroline Partridge’s daughter, Matilda, was nearly five months old, she became violently ill.
“She just continued to vomit, and vomit, and vomit, and vomit,” the paramedic recalls. “At first I just thought maybe she’d picked up a bug or something, because her sister was in childcare.”
It seemed the most likely cause of her baby’s illness: before the vomiting started, Ms Partridge had only fed Matilda an innocuous bowl of rice cereal.
“I took her to the doctors and they said it was just a stomach bug, it’s quite normal in children this age to vomit quite a lot when they have a stomach bug. They said to just keep her fluids up and she’ll be fine. Which is not actually what happened.”
Over the next nine months, Matilda had eight similar reactions, each after eating different foods. Underweight, the infant was diagnosed with failure to thrive.