The climb to 4000...

...4000 mg of peanut flour, that is. It might not look like a lot - but if you ground up and de-fatted 13 peanuts - this is what you'd be left with. (removing the fat is what makes it taste so bad!!)




A year to the day from starting, Matt dosed up to 4g of peanut flour yesterday. Along with skin and blood testing, he downed those peanuts and had no adverse effects. Still not fond of the taste - Jan and Pam (his nurses) gave us some other ideas to try that might help with the flavour.


If you have never seen skin testing - this is what it looks like. The control (histamine) in the bottom right of his back is done to prove that he will in fact react. There is also a saline control - he reacts to that as well, just because he has such sensitive skin. The rest of the spots are titration's (dilutions) of peanut protein suspended in liquid. This time - the one that Jan is scratching was the one that really bothered him, and it's the most concentrated titration. Usually his back is lit up like a friggin Christmas tree - but this time - just that one was bad. They told me not to read *too* much into it - but I am anyway.

(There are tests above every black pen mark you see on his back. Some of the spots you cannot really see at all.)

Once the 15 minutes is up, they stick regular old tape to the spots on his back and trace the flare (hive) and the weal (redness) - you can see that the circles are smaller again, than they were last time. Progress! We should get his blood results sometime in the next month. He was at 1206 last time.

Column one is from March 2009. Column 2 is from around September... then the third was done today.

July 28th he goes back for more skin and blood testing, and we will hope for more positive progress.

It is not easy to do this - not easy for Matthew, and not easy for us as his parents - to put him through something that we know he really doesn't like. I know in the grand scheme of things - there are bigger medical issues out there to deal with... but still - we carry on. If this is our one shot to hopefully rid him of a life of looking over his shoulder... I am not going to let that slip through my hands without a fight!

I am proud of Mattie for gettin' it done. He really hates it.