Whew, this fall has been busy, but good! We had a wonderful holiday season and have really enjoyed wrapping up 2011.
Our son is still doing great on his treatment plan at Duke and we continue to feel so blessed to be able to participate. Dr. Burks and his team are moving to UNC later this year and we will go with him and the whole clinical trial unit. We will finish our updosing before they move, so the only change for us will be going to UNC instead of Duke every 4 months afterward and for our food challenges when we get there. Anyway, he is doing great and has had no issues with any of his doses thus far.
We have gotten good news on his IgE levels too. His initial IgE was 8.52 on day 1 at Duke. In August, his IgE was 16. It is the pattern of everyone on the treatment...the IgE goes up initially, then begins to drop. So, we had another blood draw on November 28 and we just got the results......6.21!!! Wow, I am so excited to see it drop below where we started already! I didn't expect to see that until after we hit maintenance. Woo hoo! So, we have 4 more visits before maintenance. Once we hit maintenance, we will only go back every 4 months for bloodwork and to get our next set of doses. We will head home with a huge bag of doses....4 months worth then! That will be a big difference from our little 2 week bags!
In other news, our hearts and prayers go out to the family in Chesterfield, VA who lost their little girl this week to a peanut allergy reaction. So tragic. I can only pray that the work we are doing at Duke will help other children someday and help to keep them safe!
