Sunday, October 17, 2021

One year ago yesterday is the day I walked into our future home

It was not for sale. In fact the owner told me on the phone that it was not for sale and she had no plans to sell it. I went to look at it on 10-16-20 under the guise and renting it long time. Even though the house was in sad shape and the decor even sadder, that evening we had our real estate agent send over an offer. This is what it looked like at the time.

Tuesday, October 5, 2021

I found this house on October 16, 2020

I knew when I saw it, that even though it was outdated it was the perfect home for me. The challenge was it was not for sale. But everyhing has a price, right? I called my real agent and had her send an offer over to the owner. After a lot of back and forth and negotions the house was ours. We closed on Dec. 7, 2020 and immediately hired an architect, a contractor and an interior designer. So come along and follow me through this massive remodel. These pictures are from before we broke ground and how the house and furnishings looked when we bought it. The house was previously owned by Bobby Cavender who owns Land Rover/Jaguar in San Antonio.

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Anyone with allergies should BEWARE of Indian takeaways, warns coroner after Wigan boy, 12, dies from nut allergy | Mancunian Matters

Anyone with allergies should BEWARE of Indian takeaways, warns coroner after Wigan boy, 12, dies from nut allergy | Mancunian Matters



Really scary article.  I would never let my 14 year old eat Indian food for the mere fact mentioned in the article that the owner of the restaurant did not realize how severe food allergies can be.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Wow Great News!

Peanut Allergy Study With Xolair: Impressive Results

A new pilot study testing “rapid” peanut desensitization has resulted in 92 percent of subjects being able to tolerate 160 to 400 times more peanut than they could at the study’s outset.
Published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, the study’s aim was to test whether combining the asthma drug omalizumab – known by the brand name Xolair – with controlled peanut exposures would speed up and/or improve the process of oral immunotherapy or OIT. In OIT, the patient consumes tiny, then increasing amounts of an allergen with the aim of becoming desensitized to it.
Though the study was small, the results were impressive. The 13 participants, all highly allergic to peanut, were pre-treated with Xolair for three months. Then, after just one day of OIT treatment, all of them were able to tolerate 992 mg of peanut flour. After an average of eight weeks, 12 out of 13 patients were able to tolerate 4,000 mg of peanut flour, or roughly 10 peanuts. At this point, treatment with Xolair stopped, but the subjects continued to eat 4,000 mg of peanut per day.
Six months later, they were all able to tolerate about 20 peanuts without reacting. Depending on the patient, this represented an increase of 160 to 400 times what they could tolerate when the study began.
By using the combination of Xolair and OIT, the patients were able to become desensitized much more rapidly than previous studies have shown. For example, a previous peanut desensitization study that didn’t use Xolair found that it took an average of 30 weeks for subjects to reach doses of 500 to 2,000 mg of peanut. With Xolair incorporated into the treatment method, not only was the amount of time required cut by more than half, but the amount of peanut tolerated was more than doubled.
Xolair works by preventing IgE antibodies (the antibodies involved in allergy) from attaching to mast cells in the body, which is an important step in the process that leads to allergic reaction. Xolair is typically used for allergic asthma.
However, there were some drawbacks to the treatment: 2 percent of peanut ingestions were associated with reactions. While most of these were mild and easily controlled with antihistamines, three patients had reactions that required epinephrine. However, considering how quickly the peanut doses were increased, and that the patients were a high-risk group to begin with, the study authors note that overall the reactions were “surprisingly mild”.
The next step for this research is to conduct a much larger study. If results are similar, this could represent a giant step forward towards a food allergy treatment.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Peanut Allergy Forces Emergency Landing (Video)

As a parent of a 13 year old anaphylactic to peanuts this is my worst fear!  And we fly a lot.  You can't trust what the crew says at all.

Peanut Allergy Forces Emergency Landing (Video)