Barney Butter?! Who knew!?

In the last 10 years, our family stayed away from nuts and peanuts.  We kept a tree nut and peanut free home.  Matt and I did not eat nuts or peanuts away from home unless we knew for sure that we would not be seeing Molly.  It was fine- no problem for us to not eat them, no big deal. 

A week ago Molly had an almond oral food challenge and passed... HOORAY!!!  Not only can Molly eat almonds without having a reaction- Dr. Sugerman is encouraging her to eat almonds on a regular basis to avoid future reactions!  Life changing stuff here!  Honestly, it was nerve wracking for her, for me, for her dad, well really the whole family.  Most of her life (her first reaction to peanut butter was at 6 months old) we have been told to STRICTLY avoid ALL NUTS.  PERIOD.  Even if she had not had positive skin and  RAST testing to tree nuts, we would still have been told to avoid them as many nuts and peanuts are manufactured together.

Fast forward 9 years and we have seen many changes in the allergy world.  The availability of peanut and tree nut foods has grown as the presence of food allergies in the community has increased.  We were able to find almonds that were not processed around other nuts or peanuts.  Molly isn't crazy about them but will eat them.  We tried almond milk, but unfortunately she isn't a fan of that either.  So I started looking at nut butters.  I could not find any safe almond butter at our grocery store, all had peanut and cashew warnings.  I started looking on the internet and found other moms in similar situations talking about Barney Butter, an almond butter that is safe for those who have other tree nut or peanut allergies.  I ordered from Amazon, and thanks to Amazon Prime, it was here in two days! 

After scrutinizing and double checking the label, I tried it.... OMG.... my mouth was in heaven.  I had forgotten how great the creaminess of a nut butter could be (I don't care for sunbutter or soy butter to eat, just for baking).  Molly tried it.  It was okay with her although she wasn't nuts about it (no pun intended!). She decided it was better than almond milk or eating almonds.  Every couple days or so, she eats a BB&J sandwich or a spoonful.  And that was the goal, to find something she could tolerate eating regularly, but for me, it's hard to keep my spoon out of that jar... who knew it would be so good!!??

SO MUCH EXCITEMENT!

I'm not even sure where to begin!  Molly, and our family, are going to be adventuring into a new world of OIT.  What is OIT, you ask?  AWESOME QUESTION!  OIT is oral immunotherapy.  For us, that means that Dr. Sugerman, of Dallas Allergy and Immunology will begin giving Molly micrograms of peanut and tree nut in a liquid solution in small doses everyday.  The long term goal is for Molly to be able to tolerate whole peanuts and tree nuts.  Molly has had past anaphylactic reactions to peanuts and carries Auvi-Q an Epinephrine auto injector (similar to Epi-pens) with her at all times.  Is this scary for us?  YES.  Will it be life changing for us?  YES!   Is is it safe!  It does have risks, however, in a controlled setting, under the supervision of an allergy doctor, the risk is minimized (DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME ON YOUR OWN!!!). For many years, allergist have done OIT with patients who are allergic to medications such as aspirin and antibiotics safely. 

Molly had her first appointment recently and it was fantastic.  Molly had a peanut component test done.  We had never had this lab before and even though we already knew that Molly had anaphylactic reactions in the past, it confirmed what we already knew.  Molly had positive results for 3 of the different components.  Most importantly, she tested positive to ara h2, the peanut component associated with anaphylactic reactions.  Although seeing this result on paper was kind of a bummer, it did not change anything and some other RAST scores indicated that Molly might be able to have a food challenge to almonds.  Molly has had low RAST scores but high skin test scores to almonds in the past (this is probably due to be amazingly atopic, love that eczema!). Molly successfully completed an almond food challenge, eating an amazing 42 almonds that day in a period of 6 hours!  HOORAY! 

Dr. Sugerman also told us he thought Molly would be a great candidate to try multiple OIT at once, taking peanut, cashew, and walnut doses all at one time!  She will be one of the first to try this at Dallas Allergy and Immunology- we are excited because that will shorten the duration of the program for us, which is normally 6 months for EACH allergy. 

We head back to Dallas on March 5th and begin the program officially on the 6th....keep following us in our adventures in OIT!