Endoscopy results

We received the results of Asher's endoscopy today ..... everything looks good. There are still eosinophils in Asher's esophagus, but they are "under the limit". Dr. Putnam says that it just takes a very long time to completely get rid of them.

Now we can add foods back into Asher's diet - one at a time. Offer one food; wait a month. Offer another food; wait another month. After 3-4 foods, do another endoscopy and get the results. Repeat.

I know this is good news. This is exactly the news for which we hoped. The joy was tempered with other news....

While preparing for the endoscopy, the nurses asked routine questions. One of the questions was, is Asher allergic to any foods? After giving the nurses this long laundry list of foods to which Asher tested positive on the skin prick test, I asked Dr. Putnam what he thought - if Asher really was allergic to all those foods or if some of them were false positives. Dr. Putnam's response took me by surprise. He said that he suspected that they were all true positives - that Asher is truly allergic to all those foods and that there are probably going to be a lot more foods to which he tests positive. And he tried to prepare us for a lot of food failures as we go into food trials. The thought of that is overwhelming.

Anyway, for a lot of reasons, we chose pork as the first food to try. Asher's thrilled that he gets to eat food -- and less super-milk. So, we'll just keep going and see where this road takes us. But we reserve the right to change our minds at any moment.

Asher in Cincinnati, scope looks clean!

Asher and Liz are in Cincinnati for his first endoscopy since starting the elemental diet. Liz called from the hospital to tell me that everything went well and that Dr. Putnam said the scope looks clean, though he's been surprised before so we'll wait until the lab results are back Tuesday afternoon/Wednesday to be sure. Later, they went to the zoo and Asher had a rice cake, his first "real food" in about two months!

We'll post more later (including some pictures).

Admin note: RSS feed posts out of order

We've switched to the new Blogger interface. One of the new features is "Labels" (which the rest of Web 2.0 world calls "tags"). I've been going back and tagging labeling old posts. Unfortunately, Blogger orders the RSS feed by update time, and labeling counts as an update. The actual webpages are ordered properly, but if you are using a blog reader then the list of posts will probably be confusing (the "Set-back for Asher" post at the top of the list is actually from March 2005). If you aren't using a blog reader then this doesn't matter and is probably confusing ...

[April 3 update: you can use the link http://rubensingh.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=published to get a feed ordered by published date]