There is a lot of information we have to share. Even though we’ve only been in the program since January and been to three appointments, the data is overwhelming. Today we are going to share with you what a day and week in our treatment life looks like right now. It changes every time we go to an appointment, we will share more on that later.
Eli gets up around 6am and upon waking he takes three medications, an antihistamine, flonase, and an innovative seasonal allergy treatment called Sublingual Oral Immunotherapy (SLIT). These have to be done before he eats or drinks, in particular the SLIT treatment.
SLIT treatment dosing:
Eli sprays the treatment bottles (there are 2) underneath his tongue, and has to hold it in his mouth for 2 minutes (no swallowing)
Once those 2 minutes are over, he can swallow the spray and then has to wait at least 10 minutes before he can eat or drink
Eli’s breakfast consists of both maintenance foods and recommended foods. He wasn’t much of a breakfast eater before, but he is required to eat his maintenance foods at least four hours before his dosing, so we do this in the morning before we go to school. Right now, his maintenance foods are buckwheat, chia, and poppy seed. I bake them into a banana muffin!
Maintenance foods are foods he has dosed in small amounts at home and then challenged in the clinic.
Recommended foods are foods he should be eating each week in varying amounts.
He eats his recommended foods throughout the day and they consist of things like stone fruits, peanuts and soy, apples, pears, beef, and chicken. There are various amounts and frequency required throughout the week. There is a picture below of our full allergy treatment tracking chart for this cycle.
Eli then goes to school and has a typical day. When he gets home, we let him chill for a little bit, but around 3:30 we begin dosing his treatment foods. Treatment foods are introduced at the allergy institute to ensure he can eat them safely. After he tries them and can tolerate them, they give us a dosing plan that involves beginning with very small amounts of the food at home, and increasing the dose until his next appointment where he will challenge the food in the hopes that he can tolerate it and then it becomes a part of our maintenance food in the morning. Eli doses two foods at the same time, he eats his first food, waits 15 minutes, then eats his second. After this he is required to sit still and be restful for an hour.
By this time, we are pretty close to dinner or I am making dinner, and that is his full food allergy treatment day! I will go back and explain some of the reasoning for the medications and the foods in future posts, but for now, you get to know what his typical day is like!
