The Incredible Reason 1 Mom of a Kid With Severe Food Allergies No Longer Has to "Worry"

By Kate Schweitzer

"Today my peanut-allergic son ate 24 peanuts," one mom wrote on a Facebook post.

But don't worry – this story has a happy ending. It's one in which the boy "scarfed down two handfuls of his allergen . . . and he liked it!"

For parents of kids with severe food allergies, this might seem like an urban legend, but Sarah Wynia Smith explained how oral immunotherapy – a new, experimental treatment that, when performed early in a child's life, helps kids build up enough of a tolerance to eat cross-contaminated food – helped her son take control of his peanut allergy. And in turn, it rid her of the constant anxiety that came with keeping her child safe in the thousands of everyday scenarios that used to plague her family.

"I felt trapped and terrified almost constantly."

How is this possible, especially from a kid who has reacted to "trace amounts of peanut protein from other people's apparently clean hands?"

For starters, it wasn't overnight. In fact, for the past eight months, they have attended weekly, hours-long desensitization treatments with an allergist.

"On his first day, he started out drinking juice, which had five micrograms of peanut protein diluted into it," she wrote. "His appointment lasted six hours, during which time he was administered an increasing amount of the allergen diluted in juice. It was milligrams he could tolerate at the end of the day. We were sent home with a bottle of our own solution, instructed to give it daily, and return in a week for another increase in amount under the supervision of the allergist."

Over 25 appointments and hundreds of at-home doses, he slowly built up a tolerance. He went from diluted peanut powder juice to peanut flour to real peanuts expertly measured out and weighed on a scale.

"It took three months to work up to a single peanut," Smith wrote. "Three more to get him to 12 peanuts."

Although she hesitates to declare him "cured" of his allergy, she is proud that he is officially tolerant of the food.

But was all that work worth it?

I don't think anybody in our family would consider it a waste of time, money, or all of that driving for what it has given us in exchange. I've seen Jackson have an anaphylactic reaction. I've had to administer his Epi-Pen. Even more difficult over all these years of managing a life-threatening food allergy has been the extreme anxiety that I've shouldered. It's not a universal experience among parents of food allergy kids, but for me personally, I felt trapped and terrified almost constantly. He too was starting to get anxious about food that wasn't safe. Any food with a trace of peanut in it could have literally killed him. This led to our family avoiding not only restaurants that served anything with peanuts (I know how "careful" food service is about cross-contamination), but things like baseball games, birthday parties, wedding cakes, potlucks. It was all just too anxiety-provoking for the benefits to outweigh the negatives to attending such things. It was very socially isolating in a way that I never truly appreciated until managing a food allergy.

For all the parents of kids suffering from food allergies, oral immunotherapy could be a solution. As for Smith, she's getting ready to do something else she never thought possible:

She wrote: "I'll send him to kindergarten this Fall without worry that an innocent-looking cupcake sent in by a well-meaning classmate would send him to the ER."