Late last evening, I got hit with that question that no adoptive mother wants to hear from a medical professional: "Does he have a history of …..?"

It felt so ridiculously helpless to say "I don’t know". The doctor is looking for answers as to how we wound up in the emergency room, and all I could manage was "I don't know".

Last year, my little guy got stung by a bee. It made a welt on his leg that was uncomfortable for a few days, but that was it. Yesterday, just after we returned home from a great Chinese dinner, he got stung again. One welt rapidly multiplied into several. His eyes grew puffy, his lips got puffy. His breathing wasn't compromised (which would have meant an immediate call to 911), so I threw both kids back in the car and hightailed it to the ER in the next town. A couple of hours later, he was back to his old self thanks to some Prednisone and Benadryl. And I'm going to be packing an EpiPen from now on.

Jenna, at the Birth-First Parents Blog wrote just last month that access to medical information was one of the big benefits of open adoption. And yes, that was definitely something I wish I had had last night.

Funny thing is, when I left Sakhalin Island with my little guy in 2005, I was feeling pretty smug about how much medical information I had on him. A big thick pile of records from the orphanage, and some more on his biological mother and grandmother thanks to the court hearing. But as with so many things in life, the one piece of information that you need is usually the one you don't have.

Last year, after he got stung, I remember asking him whether he had ever been stung by a bee in Sakhalin. He said "No" then, but he wasn't yet communicating well in English. Last night, I asked him again, and he again said "No". Maybe that is the right answer.

Luckily, we have some ways of closing this one medical information gap. In two weeks, he's going to go for a battery of allergy tests. That will help, but I don’t know if I will ever stop wondering now what else I don't know about him that I should know to give him a healthy future.