Sorry - I just need to vent...
My son (age 6) had his checkup with his allergist today. We had done the blood test about a couple weeks ago. My son's #'s went from 7.98 down to 3.99. Still a Class 3, but not by much. My son has never had a reaction other than his initial one (knock on wood). He only has a peanut allergy. He's fine on all tree nuts, etc.
So, the allergist comes out with "I want to do another skin prick test on him". I had been so excited that his #'s had dropped, but was scared to death for this. I told the allergist I didn't want this to make his numbers go back up, but was told that it wouldn't. Still not sure how much I agree with that.
Anyway, we start the skin prick test. He puts the drop of peanut serum on my son - and we're watching - AND NOTHING HAPPENS. My daughter and I were trying to jump around in the room without getting my son too excited. There were happy tears happening everywhere.
So, the Dr. comes back in and said that was good, but now we needed to test a more concentrated serum. He put the drop on my son's back - and - there was a reaction. We were devastated.
Now - the tears were sad ones.
After the numbers going down, and the first skin prick being negative, we had our hopes so high. Now, after all that, I hope that I didn't set my son back by exposing him. We are so very careful with everything he comes in contact with. To top it off, he said since he's 6 now, and still has the allergy, the odds of him ever outgrowing it are only 10%.
I feel like someone somewhere was playing a really cruel joke on us.
Thanks for listening (or reading as the case may be).
I'm so sorry this happened KCRC! It can be so frustrating. I wasn't aware a skin test could cause numbers to go back up.
We had a very frustrating experience this year, too. My son's RAST for pn came back as zero in February. They told me to go ahead and give him PB at home because the allergy was gone. I said no way!! They said if I was "too scared" we could wait until we came back in the summer. So I spent several months thinking it was gone but still not feeding him anything he should have.
We went back in on June 30. The doctor gave him PB and had to call 911 less than 5 minutes later. We were devastated. My son's only 3 so he was freaking out. So now, not only is it not gone, we probably made it worse!!
Needless to say, we have changed allergists!! Our new allergist talked about how important skin tests were since our last allergist didn't do one before that food challenge.
Sorry, I guess I needed to vent a little too...
Hi
So sorry to hear that. A few years ago DS #'s were going down.. I was really hoping upon hope that he was out growing it. We did a rast test and the numbers came up higher... I hung up the phone and cried. I understand your frustration and sadness... I guess there are different opinion on wether or not a skin prick is an exposure..
This whole Peanut allergy is a creul joke if you ask me....
some days I get so mad..... I would LOVE to just once go some where and not have to plan ahead or make accomodations it would be so nice. Just the other day we went to six flags and for days I spent time and phone calls and emails trying to see what we were going to do about his epi pen sice we wanted to go on water slides... and it was just me and my DS so I could give it to someone to hold while we were doing this. anyway
didn't mean to ramble but I hear ya!