Nearing the Big Day

Wow.  I cannot believe that it has been 12 weeks now since the little guy started maintenance dosing. The end of October was a busy time with Halloween.  That was a fun holiday this year. He was able to try several new candies that he had never had before--talk about excitement for a 6 year old!  Twix bars, cookies and cream Hershey bars, Kit Kat bars, and his favorite--M&MS!  It was a joy to watch something so simple (and something most of us take for granted) excite him so much.  The M&M frenzy continued into November and then into Christmas with baking M&M cookies with the red and green ones.  Very fun holiday times.

The maintenance dosing has gone very smoothly. He was off both stomach medications by about       2 1/2 weeks into the dosing, around November 1st. I know he was ready to come off of them both sooner, but I was not going to try anything that would even remotely cause a set back.  Soon after stopping the medications I became brave and let him do his dosing in the morning on the weekends with his breakfast. That went smoothly too!  Yay!  Now we actually freed up our weekend time so we didn't have to be home by lunch each day. You can't even tell at this point that it has any effect on him and he reports not noticing a thing when he eats it.  That is good because that is the goal!

Today does mark the end of the 12 week maintenance period.  The allergist already had several kids arranged to do their challenge tomorrow on the 9th, so we opted to wait another week and have him go next Friday, January 18th when he is out of school. It will be another long day of sitting in clinic for at least 4 hours while they build him up in 4-5 peanut increments every 30 minutes to a total of 15-16 peanut equivalents. He will have to eat it all in powder form so that should be interesting trying to mix all that powder!  I hope he can make it all the way. If not, he will go back on daily maintenance and will get the chance to try again.

I will post more details on how the challenge will go as the allergist sends them to me. That day is also my birthday and I can't think of a better present than to watch the little guy succeed. It would be a win for us all.

To be continued...