Oral Immuno Therapy (OIT): the beginning of our hopefully milk allergy-free life!!

Last Thursday was a very BIG day for Ella and for us all. She started her oral immuno therapy treatment for milk. Ella Bella Portabella was able to take in progressively 1 mg of milk with no issues!!! This is quite a victory for us.

It was also a terribly long day in the Infusion room (the room where kids take their doses and wait to see if any reaction occurs. Kind of a cool/scary name for that room, if you ask me.) We got there at 8:30 in the morning and didn't leave until 5 pm.

The beginning: she was not so sure about this whole thing... Daddy was also not too happy about me taking pictures...!

The first dose:

Starting at 9:10 am, Ella was given 10 doses of 0.1 ml concentration milk every 15 minutes. If everything would go well and no reaction would occur, she would be given the next dose, and the next dose, and so on. We took it all one very small step at a time, every 15 minutes that is. Once she passed her 10 0.1 ml concentration doses, they started giving her 1.0 ml concentration milk diluted in various quantities of water, from 0.5 ml up to 8 ml. Her very last dose was at 3:45 pm, 0.3 ml whole milk dilluted in some water. After she took it, we waited and watched for over an hour. Our little girl was blessed and lucky to pass all her doses just fine and so we went home on a 0.3 ml milk dose twice daily, morning and night for the next week. From here on, we'll be going to the allergist office every week for slight dose increases to the treshhold her body can handle. She will be progressing up until she can drink 8 oz. of whole milk with no reaction. So welcome to Horizon Organic Whole Milk Enhanced with Vitamin D milk into our fridge!!! :)
Daddy drawing a visual of what was going to happen and making her smile.

(I was also dealing with a major sinus cold, and still am...)

Those long eight hours were filled with watching movies, snacking, coloring, drawing, and a lot of anxiety. Ella was very nervous the whole time, as I expected. Of course, both Hrishi and I were anxious and nervous as well. It helped her though to have a little buddy in there, a little five year old boy who was doing his first OIT for peanuts. While they didn't interract much, they would peak at each other from across the room and watch the same movies. :)

Her beautiful smile coming back along with her confidence that everything was going to be okay:

(She was enjoying a delicious cupcake made by mamaie.)

Writing and drawing "MILK":

At the end of the day: tired but happy and pleased:

What a day...!

This is really such a wonderful thing for us and I'm so so very grateful to the advances in the immunology field for food allergies. There are very few clinics in U.S. who do these treatments for food allergies. The Dallas Allergy and Asthma clinic is one of them. They've been doing OIT for over eight years. They have this big "OIT Graduates" poster of a large group of lucky children who went through the treatment and are now cleared to safely consume, to which I hope and pray our little one can join them at the end of her 26 + weeks course of treatment.

I know there's no easy road ahead of us but I pray with all my heart that all will go well and she will be able to overcome all there is to overcome.

We have some other news but I'll post on that later once things are finalized. I just love my life, crazy and funky, scary, blessed and wonderful, all at the same time. :)

And I can't help but add this beautiful picture Ella drew during one of our drawing lessons.. she is teaching me portrait drawing techniques. :-) The one of the right is hers. I think it's so original and artistic and so different from mine.