If you’ve been following us on our journey you will know that my son Sahil is starting high school this September with less allergies than when I started writing this blog.

Sahil is still allergic to peanuts but he eats 2 peanuts a day since he completed peanut oral immunotherapy in October 2017.  He has to consume the peanut dose daily in order to maintain the desensitization.  This allows him to safely eat food which has been cross contaminated with peanuts.  He has also passed oral food challenges to many tree nuts and soy and has successfully incorporated these in to his diet.

My youngest daughter Jaya is still on a very low daily dose of milk as part of milk oral immunotherapy treatment.  We are holding her dose at 1 mL daily because she had two anaphylactic reactions during treatment.    Jaya was diagnosed with a milk allergy at 5 months old after she reacted to a baby cereal containing skim milk powder. She subsequently tested positive for egg, peanut and tree nuts so we have diligently avoided giving her those foods for eight years.  On July 30th, Jaya returned to Dr Mack for skin testing to see if she could have oral food challenges for any of the foods she has been avoiding.  Based on the skin tests, Dr Mack recommended oral food challenges for almond, walnut and hazelnut.  While the skin test for these nuts were not negative, Dr Mack felt the wheal sizes were small enough to orally test.

This week we went back for Jaya’s first oral food challenge. Armed with Barney butter, Wonderful brand almonds and Blue Diamond Chocolate Almond Milk we were ready for the challenge.  Well, Jaya seemed ready. And really brave! I was the one who was extremely anxious but I tried not to let Jaya see my nervousness.

Nurse Heather decided on using the Barney butter since Jaya said she didn’t think she could chew an actual nut.  The chocolate milk may have been tasty but she would have to consume a large amount to ingest enough almond protein for the challenge.

We started with a small amount of the almond butter and every 15 – 20 minutes she was given more until she completed 6 doses.  While she did not like the taste or the texture of the almond butter she tolerated the amounts given with no obvious symptoms.  She was monitored for 2 hours after the last dose and then she was assessed by Dr Mack.

She passed!

I am so relieved.  I am also happy to be able to incorporate almonds and almond products in to her diet.

Next month: Walnut