You gotta get involved!

Among all the lessons we’ve learned as parents of a child with life threatening food allergies, the hardest lesson to accept has definitely been the reality that there will always be a small percentage of people who will not consider your child’s right to live above their own selfishness.  There will always be people who don’t understand, yet refuse to let you educate them.  There will always be people who resent your child.  There will always be people who could care less about your child’s safety.  And, there will always be people who will shun your child because it’s easier to shun her than to deal with her needs… and all of it really, really hurts (and it sucks even more when those type of people live right next door to you).

So, how do you live a life dealing with people like that?  Even though they are the minority, one bad seed can spoil the whole bunch.  How do you make the world a better place for your child, when you've been told that all you can do is avoid the problem?  This has been the topic of many of my conversations with the Lord.  I am a woman of faith, and I’ve been praying since the day we discovered Brooke’s allergies, for God to take them back.  I have prayed for a miracle. I have prayed for her to outgrow the allergies. However, I have come to realize that miraculous healing is not what God has planned for Brooke.

A wise preacher in TX once said “Your miracle is not going to happen while you sit on your knees and pray. Your miracle is not going to happen while you lay in the bed and wish. Your miracle is not going to happen just because you need it. You gotta get involved." -TD Jakes.

Though it would be awesome, I do not believe that you can pray away your sickness or your physical ailments or your allergies, but I do believe that God gave man the wisdom to create medicine.  And, I do believe what Mr. TD Jakes says, we can’t just sit back and expect a miracle… we gotta get involved.  I've always said that I would do anything to help Brooke get rid of her allergies.  My heart has always been ready to get involved... I just needed to find the right path to take.

Scott and I had heard of clinical trials aimed at researching potential cures for food allergies. I never really paid much attention to the studies because I thought of them as unattainable.  Most of them were being conducted hours and hours away from us.  The child had to get past the waiting list, and meet certain requirements to be admitted to the study, and then there was always the possibility that your child would be the one to receive the “placebo”.  But, the biggest deterrent was the thought of letting my child take part in an experimental study, something that hadn’t yet been proven successful.

Last fall, I was reading a blog that my friend Anna writes.  Anna and I have known each other for the last 4 years.  We came to know each other through the play/support group I had joined for moms with food allergic children.  Anna’s son has multiple life threatening food allergies, and for as long as I have known her, she has been researching all the latest studies for a cure. Her latest blog post was all about a doctor she had found who was offering a proven therapy called Oral Immunotherapy (OIT) in his private practice.  This wasn’t a study, or an experiment, it was a REAL treatment!  I was captivated to say the least.

I spent the next several weeks looking over Anna’s research, doing a little research of my own, and reading as much as I could about other parents who were thinking of doing OIT, in the process of doing OIT, or had already completed OIT for their children.  It didn’t take long for me to decide that this was the road we needed to travel.  This was our way to “get involved!”