Markalark's Glass-Palace. Everyone's invited !

We had quite a day today.  Ate my 40mg dose this morning and everything went fine. 2 hours later though, things went a bit hectic. For the first time in 4 years, Stephanie the only person around me who always double checks everything I eat, who always chases down waitresses to make sure that whatever I ordered blindly doesn’t contain any peanuts and who always brushes her teeth twice after eating something that may have been in contact with peanuts or other nuts, accidently fed me a peanut sauce meal. She had bought some various-flavored tuna cans and checked the labels of two of the three.  The only one that she hadn’t read carefully had peanuts smack dab in there. And not “traces of peanuts”; the real deal.

I took three or four bites and noticed that something was wrong right away: itchy throat, and minutes later, spasms in the esophagus; nothing too severe, but enough to know that something was wrong. It reminded me of the small intolerance I had to beans and peas a while back.  We checked the label to confirm my suspicions and then, seeing how things weren’t THAT bad, I decided to chug down some Benadryl and ride it out. Everything went well and the symptoms slowly went away. About an hour later, almost nothing remained except the excessive drowsiness brought on by the Benadryl.

Lessons learned? Always check labels. I’m not yet bullet proof, but my experiment seems to be going in the right direction as the allergic reaction was a lot less severe than last time I consumed peanuts in any serious degree. I better keep it up then.

 

Things are going incredibly well on the Peanut front. Three weeks ago when I went from 10mg to 20mg, I got pretty nauseous for the first three days but then it got better. This week, I went up to 40mg which is the equivalent of 1/8 of a whole peanut. Nothing at all happened! NO side-effects whatsoever. So week 9 of this little science project is halfway through which only leaves 11 more weeks before there are no more increases and where I’ll be eating 5 peanuts every day. Up until now, I’m extremely impressed with the results.

On the non-peanut agenda, I encourage you to go visit and comment this little blog that the short film project I am in is asking me to contribute to. Might give you some insight on what’s happening on that front and give you hints on what to expect from my little movies.

Week4

 

The past couple days have been perfect. No more side effects from the 7mg of peanut flour; which brings me to a (tiny) problem:

 

Through the help of science buddies of mine, I was able to fish out the actual data from the original science experiment in the UK (glory to the internets). It seems that the dosage they were using were not in milligrams of flour, but actually milligrams of peanut protein. Since the flour we are using is 50% peanut protein, I have been taking only half the dosage that the original experiment was using. It’s not that big of a problem, it just made me ease in a LOT more gradually into the adventure than what they did with their lowest tolerating test subject.  So next week when I go up to 10mg of peanut FLOUR, the real experiment will begin.

 

The paper really is useful; it shows what exact dosage they used on all the subjects and what specific reactions were witnessed.  I now know what I can expect (like stomach pains, nausea, runny nose, throwing up –yay-) and that the symptoms are normal and should subside after 2 or 3 days (pretty much what I’ve been experiencing with the dizziness)
Huzzah for science!

 

 

Week2
Not much to say about the second week of this little project. I guess that’s incredible news then. No headaches, no nausea, no dizziness… My body seems fully adjusted to the 5mg dose. At the end of the second week, we’ll try a higher dose and see what happens.

Day 15-Day18
Ok, we decided to up the dose to 7mg on Sunday. 10mg seemed a bit high as a next step and we want to go easy on me.  On day 15 I got a bit dizzy again but nothing out of control. Day 16 was a bit harder as I got dizzier than the previous day.  I then decided to take Val’s advice which seemed to work well on week one. Whenever I get dizzy, the next day I take a slightly lower dose and then go back up the following day. It seems to do the trick because today, Day 18, I took a full 7mg dose and everything is ok. I think that easing the body into a higher dose in a seesaw manner really is the way to go. We’ll see how tomorrow goes.

 

Day 4
Ok, today was a weird day… Since I’ve been feeling dizzy a bit too much to my liking the last couple days, Val and I went back to the lab (which will henceforth be called, THE LAIR) and measured up a couple of 4mg doses in the hopes that they will go down better. The strange thing is, the entire morning I’ve felt slightly dizzy and it wasn’t until I had taken that 4mg dose at lunch before I started feeling better. Like an old burnt out alcoholic, shivering with a cold sweat until he drinks his first bottle of bear at 7am, is my body becoming dependent of the peanut flour I am trying to tame?? It might also just be that Stephanie is coming down with a cold and I’m starting to catch it too... Time will tell!

Day 5
Well this is new… I tried 4.9mg at breakfast in vanilla flavored yogurt. I know this is very unscientific, taking too many things out of the equation at once, but I was getting pretty sick of being dizzy.  So we are now about an hour post consumption and I am feeling really great. Maybe the anxiety is less present; maybe, the bike ride might have helped… I’m not quite sure… But the results are there and I can live with depriving science of a great leap at my health’s expense.