Twisted Logic

In an attempt to give Matthew as normal a life as possible, I’ve spent the past year and a half learning to cook and bake using no milk and eggs.  This hasn’t been the easiest task in the world but I think I’ve managed to become pretty adept at it.  So if Matthew were to become less allergic or perhaps even not allergic at all, it would mean that all my hard earned skills would be utterly wasted.  Then it stands to reason that in order to utilize my skills to the level that they deserve, Matthew would in fact have to become more allergic.  Right?  Well, using that logic, the results of Matthew’s blood work are exactly what we wanted.

So here is a little food allergy 101.  We have done two types of allergy testing: the skin prick test which uses a tiny lancet to break the top layer of skin and deposit a small amount of the allergen to determine if there is a reaction and the blood test (called an ImmunoCap) which tests the number of immunoglobulin E antibodies (these are the ones that cause allergic reactions) for specific allergens that are present in the blood.  Anything below 1 is a low or extremely low allergy, pretty much nothing to be concerned about.  A count of 1 is moderate and it goes up from there.

Matthew’s number for milk went up from 14 to 18.  Although his doctor says a small amount like this could just be a representation of the normal day to day fluctuations of such things, it still isn’t the direction we want to be going.  But even worse is that his number for eggs went up from 26 last year to 45 this year.  Definitely not good news.  Dr. W is pretty sure based on this increase that Matthew is not inclined to outgrown these allergies on his own.  As for peanut, his number on both dates was greater than 100.  They don’t bother counting past that since by then you pretty much just better keep the epipen handy anyway. 

Based on his blood work, Dr. W decided not to do skin prick testing for egg, milk, and peanut, but she is watching him for tree nut allergies so she tested for a variety of nuts, the seasonal flu shot (we have to do this every year since the flu vaccine contains egg protein), and cats and dogs.  Good news: Matthew can eat sunflower seeds and sesame seeds which opens up options with Sunbutter and tahini and he will be able to get his flu shot this year (of course, they don't have any H1N1 vaccine to test with, but we'll deal with that one later).  Bad news:  He is allergic to dogs (we pretty much already knew this) and had a mild reaction to cashew.  Dr. W wasn’t too concerned about the cashew, but she will continue to monitor his reactions to tree nuts and for now we will definitely be staying away, especially where cashew is concerned.

Dr. W did tell me that great progress is being made in the field of desensitization therapy to milk, egg, and peanut.  She said that they are having a success rate in the neighborhood of 90%, which is very promising.  There have been a few instances of anaphylaxis associated with the therapy so it doesn’t have a complete green light, but it is close.  She’s thinking that in the future Matthew would be a good candidate for therapy, one allergen at a time of course.  So although growing out of it doesn’t look like a realistic option, there may still be hope.

In the meantime, I’ll definitely be getting the most out of my dairy, egg, and nut free baking skills.  Sunbutter cookie with soy ice cream, anyone?