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.