New Camera and the Allergist

I haven't had a ton of time to play with my awesome new camera that I got for Christmas, but I have taken a few pictures.  I LOVE it!  Here are a few pictures that I snapped.

We had Isabel's 3 months follow up with her allergist last week.  It went really well.  Her asthma is under control as are her environmental allergens.  I did some (limited) research on whether or not we should get the uKnow test.  The test is a pretty good indicator of whether or not a peanut allergic patient is likely to go into anaphylactic shock if they ever have accidental ingestion of a peanut containing product.  Because Isabel's IgE numbers are so incredibly high for peanut I opted to not do the test.  The test is $200 out of pocket and I'm sure it would have shown that she is likely to be anaphylactic to peanuts.  I haven't found anyone who has such high IgE numbers and had a negative uKnow.  And if we did for some reason come back with a low uKnow number we would still have strict avoidance of nut containing food.  So I didn't really see the point.  My allergist agreed.  I did ask her if she has ever had a patient with such high numbers outgrow the nut allergy.  Peanut allergies are not outgrown 85% of the time.  She had a couple of interesting examples. She is seeing twins and one of the twins with high IgE numbers did outgrow the nut allergy.  She had another patient who was severely allergic to all nuts (like Isabel) and did allergy shots for environmental allergens and she passed her tree nut challenge (not peanut.)  We talked about allergy shots briefly, but Isabel is too young for them (in our doctor's opinion) and her environmental allergies seem to be very well controlled at this time.  Brian, on the other hand, is having a terrible time with Cedar Fever.  The Cedar count is at record high levels this year.  It's crazy.

So we will basically continue to do what we're doing.  Having the electronic peak flow meter is the best thing I've ever done in regards to her asthma.  I still am baffled as to why her old doctor didn't recommend or even suggest peak flow monitoring.  I can see a potential problem with low peak flows and knock it out with a higher dose of inhaled steroids before it becomes a major problem (ie she ends up in the pediatric ICU again).  It's worked really really well so far.  She started having alarmingly low peak flows right around Christmas time and I immediately increased her inhaled steroid dosage and gave her her rescue inhalers and she was back in her usual peak flows withing a few days.