Six Grains of Sand: OIT Day One

We arrived in Dallas after my sweet boy’s bedtime on Wednesday, April 29.  After a quick bath, he hopped in bed. 

“Are you nervous about tomorrow?” I asked. 

He shook his head yes, and added, “Just a little bit.”

His entire life, he’s been taught to avoid egg.  The following day, he’d be encouraged to eat it.

He’s the bravest kid I know.

Just twelve hours later, we were sitting in the comfy OIT waiting room in Dr. Silver’s office.  And there it was: a syringe filled with Koolaid.  But this wasn’t your everyday cherry Koolaid.  This was a solution of Koolaid and egg white powder: 300 micrograms of egg.

Brendan taking a dose of egg white powder solution.

In an effort to wrap my mind around how much egg my child was ingesting in that first syringe, I came across this fact: a single grain of sand, weighs, on average, 50 micrograms.  Brendan was eating six grains of sand worth of egg powder.

The first and second doses (both 300 micrograms, 15 minutes apart) went well.  He moved to 400 micrograms, eight grains of eggy sand, for his third dose.

“My tongue’s a little itchy,” he noted, “and my checks are itchy, too.”

Sure enough his little face was just slightly flushed.  We parked at 400 micrograms for an hour, waiting to see if the reaction would increase or simply disappear.

A face rash only an allergy mom would notice ;).

An hour later, feeling less itchy and decidedly less flushed, my brave little man soldiered on.  Each dose was given twice, 15 minutes apart, as we watched carefully.

Hours passed.  Hundreds of micrograms turned into single milligrams—8 grains of sand turned into 80.  Another itchy tongue and slight tummy ache both dissipated before the next dose.

By the end of the day, Brendan hit the target dose for day one and was ingesting 6 milligrams of egg white powder.  That’s 120 grains of sand, .001 of an egg, or 0.1% (yes, one tenth of one percent!).

 Yes, I got my zeros right. Brendan’s current dose is 6 milligrams.  His final maintenance dose will be a full tablespoon of egg white powder, 5,220 milligrams, the equivalent of one egg. He will take his 6 milligram dose twice a day for a week, and then we’ll head back to Dallas to updose.

6 milligrams down, 5,214 to go.  Our journey that started with six grains of sand will hopefully end in FREEDOM (with an omelet on the side, of course).

The infamous bulletin board of OIT grads.
Hopefully, Brendan's face will be on this board on day :).