After 9 months of Oral Immunotherapy (OIT), Riley graduated OIT for milk! He is now an OIT graduate for both milk and eggs. This has already been so incredibly life changing for us.

Our first milk challenge was on August 2nd, 2019. This time I came with the full expectation that even though this was our first challenge, it was still a week before our final challenge and our ticket to eating milk or anything containing milk. We gave him a full cup of milk for his regular dose before we came into the office and the challenge was to take an additional cup of milk in the office. Riley doesn’t love the taste of milk, so we doused it in Hershey’s chocolate syrup like always. He downed the chocolate milk and had a seat to wait the hour to see if he had any reactions.

This challenge was a little less dramatic than our egg challenge because Riley had never eaten an egg until that visit. He had only had uncooked liquid egg white as his dose. The scrambled egg for the egg challenge was a totally new food. The chocolate milk was the same thing he takes every morning, so it didn’t seem like a big deal to him. He drank it and passed like it was normal thing to drink milk. We were instructed to decrease the dose to a half cup and would challenge again in a week. We told the doctor we were planning an ice cream party for the day after he passed his milk challenge. He told us not to plan a party that close since it was possible that he wouldn’t pass it, but we were so confident and optimistic that we just nodded at the doctor planned the party anyway.

The next week, August 9th was a big day. Riley came into the clinic after taking a half cup of milk at home for his dose and took an additional cup and a half of milk. No problems. Not a stomach cramp, no hives, no itchy mouth. Nothing. Nothing but smiles and excitement.

The next day several of Riley’s friends came over to celebrate with him. We bought seven kinds of ice cream. Vanilla, Chocolate Brownie, Cookies ‘n’ Cream, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough, Mint Chocolate Chip, Moose Tracks, and Rocky Road. Riley is not allergic to peanuts (he outgrew it last year) or almonds, so we even had a couple of ice cream flavors with nuts. There aren’t a lot of flavor options with soy or coconut ice creams, so it was fun to have so many flavors to try. His friends lined up behind the ice cream cartons with spoons and let him sample each flavor one at a time like we were at an ice cream shop. They were so excited for him and so was our family. He loved Cookies ‘n’ Cream the most (the kid has grown up on Oreos, so I suppose that is not surprising). He had two big scoops of ice cream. I watched him laughing and enjoying the time with his friends and was so happy. We did it. We finally took a step into that world everyone else lives in. The world where an ice cream party is a fun social event with smiles and laughter instead of worry, stress or isolation. I think I’m really going to like this new world and so is Riley.

After playing video games with his friends, Riley came up for another scoop of ice cream. I didn’t want to say no since he was excited about it. I know the doctor told us not to go crazy, but we kind of did. Including all of the taste-testing, he probably had closer to 4 scoops. Later that day after everyone was gone, he told me his lip had swelled up a little bit after his third scoop, but he didn’t come tell me when it happened. It wasn’t that bad, so he continued his gaming with his friends and it went away. It was a good reminder that we are still new at this, and it isn’t a complete pass for an all-you-can-eat dairy buffet. Maybe we’ll just stick with 1-2 scoops of ice cream for the future. I’m sure others would disagree, but it was still worth a little lip swelling to have a day of feeling like he didn’t have an allergy. It was also helpful to realize there are limits and we need to learn more about where our new boundaries are. It isn’t a cure, it’s a treatment. It is a treatment that is going to drastically improve our quality of life.