I found some baby Legos in the toy chest. That motivated Ozzy to sit up and play a little.
We repeat this every 15 minutes for about 3 1/2 hours: (ice cream & gatoraid)
After the final dose, Austin begins coughing. Because he has complained that his throat 'hurts' (vs. itches), he has no wheezing in his lungs, and he's having difficulty breathing, the nurse in concerned. His throat was closing up- she administered Benedryl and Albuterol. Luckily, the Benedryl worked quickly and the coughing stopped. They were about to use the Epipen if his breathing didn't immediately respond to the Benedryl.
Austin falls asleep right after. You can see in the pic below that his eyelids and ears are red but his overall complexion is flushed.
This outcome was a pretty big disappointment. For about 20 minutes, were were hopeful that we'd be sent home with him being 'cured'. This day opened up many questions for the future- about what to do next. Our stress levels were pretty high. With the food challenge failed, our next concern was Austin's tolerance level. We were praying that Austin could still tolerate the 13 peanuts a day he had been on before- and that he hadn't lost his footing there.
We didn't realize that by Tuesday, the result of this challenge would no longer be our main concern.
On Tuesday, Austin resumed his 13 m&m's a day with little problem. He complained a bit about his mouth itching, but then said, "it happens all the time".
While doing bloodwork on Monday, on the optimistic hope that Austin would have passed his food challenge, the doctor decided to run a full battery of tree nut RAST tests. This had never been done before, but she said she wanted to be sure that if she gave the 'all clear', all was actually clear. It was supposed to be a routine set of tests with the only result being to just cover our bases.
We found out on Tuesday morning that Austin tested postive for hazelnuts. Hazelnuts are in Nutella, Toblerone chocolate bars, truffles, coffee, confections, etc... Though not as prevalent as peanuts, it's an issue because it now means we're back to avoiding ALL nuts (cross contamination & cross-reactivity) and worrying about hidden dangers.
We're still not sure what it all means. For sure it's a major setback, but at very least Austin will have some protection against accidental peanut ingestion. Unfortunately, it looks like he'll still have a lifetime of asking if there's nuts in stuff.
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