As promised, I will share our journey with Southern California Food Allergy Institute’s Tolerance Induction Program here on my blog. This first post shares how we found out about the program and how we came to the decision to participate!
An invitation:
As an allergy advocate and blogger, I am often invited to try products and services to share with the allergy community. Last Spring I was invited by fellow food blogger Natalie Rhone (@nonuts4me) to attend the premiere of her food allergy documentary film entitled “Risk at First Bite”.
My initial reaction was that it would be a bit extravagant to fly to Beverly Hills for a movie!!! However my daughter Kate’s birthday was approaching and she had been asking to go away on a holiday to somewhere warm and with beaches. So… I decided to look into flights and lo and behold found that for some reason return flights from Toronto to LAX were ridiculously affordable for the dates of the movie premiere weekend. Huh! Almost felt like fate!
So… I asked Kate if she would like to go and she was ecstatic! We booked the trip and shouted out that we were Cali-bound!
Southern California bound? Meet Dr. Rhandawa!
As I shared the news that we were heading to Beverly Hills, I had people reaching out to me to tell me that if I was coming to L.A. from Canada, I had to check out Southern California Food Allergy Institute and was told that there was a doctor there named Dr. Rhandawa who was doing amazing things to treat children’s allergies. I was immediately intrigued and wanted to hear more!
Here is one of the messages I received through Facebook from a follower who saw I was planning to go to California:
Say what?!!! This sounded amazing to me! I immediately set up a phone call with this fellow allergy mom and we spoke for 2 hours on the phone! She told me all about the TIP (TOLERANCE INDUCTION PROGRAM) program and the amazing results her boys were having.
Success Stories with OIT and TIP:
Now I remembered at this point that Natalie had mentioned some doctors would be in attendance at the movie premiere and available for media interviews. I wondered, could it be possible that this Dr. Rhandawa might be coming? I went on Natalie’s blog to see and was shocked to learn that Natalie was in fact a patient of Dr. Rhandawa’s at So Cal Food Allergy! Ok, now this was getting freaky.
I read her blog posts about her treatments and how she was having success with the TIP and being able to eat soy and hazelnuts and other allergens now as a result.
Visiting the website for So Cal Food Allergy and watching their informational video had me in tears. It was in that moment that I had this feeling of fate and that somehow we were meant to be invited to this movie premiere to learn about this program! Call me hokey but it was an emotional moment as I felt that this could possibly be the answer to all of our prayers… to every wish upon a star… to every penny thrown in a fountain and to every turkey wishbone (aka “lucky bone”) wish.
So, there you have it! The story of how I first learned about the Tolerance Induction Program! Want to follow our journey as we begin the program at Southern California Food Allergy Institute?! Make sure you subscribe to the blog and check back for new posts regularly! My next post shares our first visit to Cali for the Food Allergy Documentary Movie Premiere, Risk at First Bite!
Thanks for following our journey!