Egg related morning of terror.

Our daughter's diet is at least as varied as my own these days. Indeed, sometimes more ingredients are crowbarred together in one of her meals than I manage in an average week. But she seems to enjoy most of the ridiculous parsnip, prune and peach melba type combinations with which we experiment on her palette.

So, being a man who loves a good egg, I was overjoyed one recent morning when my wife suggested scrambling some for the three of us for breakfast. Sharing the meal with our daughter meant sacrificing salt and pepper from the recipe, but we agreed that this was a worthy forfeit to pay for the honour of enjoying such a hallowed culinary experience with our offspring.

She didn't really like it.

As I swallowed my disappointment at my daughter's failure to do the same with her eggs, she chose instead to carefully spread the remainder all over her face. This is a common response of hers to any reluctance to eat something, so we let her get on with it.

Within five or ten minutes, though, an alarming redness started to appear on her face, wherever the egg had been rubbed. At first I remained nonchalantly calm; confident that this merited less worry than finishing my coffee. But my wife's greater concern soon seemed justified, as the redness rapidly grew more angry, and was joined by some frightening blotchy-welty-rashiness. It was as if our daughter had developed years' worth of very severe eczema in a few minutes.

In what seemed at the time like the most sensible option, we bathed the patient immediately; vigorously and repeatedly soaping the affected areas. Even as we did so, these areas were multiplying, appearing all over her body - including in places where no egg to skin contact had been made. This development was the one which saw my panic level catch up with my wife's. I clearly don't know as much as I should about allergies, but suddenly horrific visions of closing airways and blue faces crept ominously across my mind. This could end badly.

Our next step was to decide between spending Sunday in the waiting room of A&E and phoning NHS Direct. Mercifully, there was still no sign of our daughter experiencing any respiratory difficulties, so we chose the phone option. The nice lady on the other end reassuringly established that our daughter was indeed still breathing quite happily before promising that a nurse with an equally calming demeanour would phone us back within half an hour.

By the time the nurse did get in touch, the initial blotches were beginning to subside, so her soothing Bristolian tones served more as confirmation than revelation of our daughter's immediate recovery. She explained that egg allergies are fairly common in babies and toddlers, and are usually grown out of. Serenity was thus soon restored. We were, nevertheless, left with instructions to steer our daughter well clear of all edible ova for the foreseeable future, as well as a mild, confused sheepishness caused by the fuss we had made, tempered only by relief that it had ultimately been unnecessary.

My wife was still overcome with remorse for some time afterwards. I did my best to comfort her by pointing out that an incident such as this was the only way we could have discovered that it was a possibility. Personally I found this more confusing than comforting. I think I had stumbled upon a paradox.

But I digress. The whole episode underlined to me the tenuous fragility of a baby's life. Maybe our panic turned out to be disproportionate, but we were lucky. I wonder how many similar events end in a tragedy which no amount of love or care could have prevented. Obviously, as responsible parents, we will always take every conceivable measure to ensure our daughter's safety, but from now on I'm going to keep my fingers crossed as a backup.