Oral Food Challenge Success!

As you may or may not know, Henry has several food allergies. He was first diagnosed with cow's milk and egg allergies right after his first birthday, and the diagnosis was an epiphany of sorts for Ben and I. Before the diagnosis, we were perplexed by and anxious about Henry's many food aversions, his difficulty eating solid foods, and the seemingly random vomiting. We never seriously considered food allergies, especially after a hospital stay where the doctors had told us (erroneously) that food allergies were not the problem.

Then, one night Henry woke up crying, hives covering his body from head to toe. We took him to the urgent care clinic and the doctor on call thought it looked like an allergic reaction. We eventually traced the reaction back to the scrambled eggs in our dinner that night. Allergy testing revealed that, in addition to the egg allergy, Henry also had a pretty severe cow's milk allergy. (At that point, he was already drinking soy milk and had previously been drinking Nutramigen, a hypoallergenic baby formula. Before that he had been breastfed until his hospital stay at 5 months old.)

In addition to removing milk and eggs from Henry's diet, we were advised by the allergist to avoid other common allergens such as nuts and shellfish, at least until Henry was old enough to describe any possible symptoms of an allergic reaction. Skin testing showed positive reactions to several nuts among other foods, so we have consistently avoided nuts these past few years.

So, this long introduction (which is not even half of the story!) is all to say: Henry has successfully passed an oral food challenge for almonds! Basically, the only way to know for sure whether there is a food allergy is to ingest the food, and to wait and see if there is a reaction. We received the go-ahead from the allergist last year to perform an oral food challenge for nuts, and today we decided to finally follow through with it.  We decided to try almonds first, since Henry's skin test was negative for almonds and it is one of the nuts lower on the scale of allergenic nuts. I ended up making our favorite banana bread muffin recipe, substituting almond milk for our usual soy milk in half of the muffins, and performed a single-blind experiment with Henry as my test subject. I didn't tell him I was doing the study though, because Henry definitely gets psyched out about food if he thinks there may be milk or egg in it, and I didn't want him to experience any "phantom" symptoms. I watched him carefully for signs of an allergic reaction, but there were none at all. Success!!!

Our next step will be to try giving Henry some almonds in a higher dose, eventually working our way up to raw almonds. I'm hopeful that the food challenges will be successful since we don't have any evidence that Henry is actually allergic to almonds. And from there, maybe we will try peanuts! We'll probably still avoid cow milk and eggs for a while as Henry has had several reactions (hives and facial swelling) in the past few months from skin contact with these two allergens.

So, that's where we stand now. I'm so thankful that God has kept Henry safe these past few years, and so happy now that his first oral food challenge has gone well.