Brendan Update.

Bryce is not the only one with food allergies in this house. Brendan has a few, too. Disovered as a 5th grader, Brendan is allergic to peanuts and tree nuts. He has epi-pens, a health plan at school, and a solo locker to help keep him safe (students at his school have locker partners). While he's never had hives or other signs of anaphylaxis that we've seen with Bryce, he's never liked peanut butter or nuts, he's cried and carried on when he's eaten it and he always spits it out or throws it up when we've forced him to try it.

He hasn't been retested for his allergies since 5th grade. I managed to get him an appointment with Dr. M, the doc Bryce sees. The appointment was great-Dr. M has teens himself and mostly talked to Brendan. He won't food challenge a peanut/tree nut allergy. He did agree to skin test for peanut, almond, hazelnut and pecan-all nuts he's reacted to before and each sharing cross-reactivity with other nuts so you cover the full nut family. (I could make a joke here about the nut family I have...ha ha).

Brendan's peanut skin test was stopped 10 mins in because the welt that resulted was rated a 4. His other nuts reacted as 2 or 3 (the scale is 0-4) by the end of the 20 minute test. So he's still officially allergic to peanuts/tree nuts. Not the result we wanted, but it is what it is.

We did learn that Brendan's OAS (oral allergy syndrome) might be linked into his peanut allergy. Seems that researchers have isolated a protein in peanuts that triggers an OAS reaction, rather than an anaphylactic reaction. Dr. M said that within a year or so, there will be a blood test to show if the peanut allergy is OAS or if it is IgE. VERY interesting stuff!

We also learned that some varieties of apples trigger lesser or zero OAS reactions.  He suggested that Gala apples (Brendan's favorite!) are very high on the OAS list, but that Golden Delicious are pretty low. He said we should try a few varieties and see what ones don't trigger OAS. Brendan ate 2 Golden Delicious and he said they triggered zero OAS symptoms, but he gave their flavor a 4/10. So we'll try others.

Brendan is bummed that he can't have M & M's, but he realizes that he doesn't have the allergy restrictions his brother has, and he's fine with things how they are.