keepin' it sorta real

Have you ever had a clash-of-realities moment where, for example, some family member is in the hospital, and you pick up the newspaper in the morning and without thinking check the headlines for something along the lines of Grandpa doing fine? I mean, it's your grandfather, and that should be front page news, right?

. . . Ok, maybe it's just me.

Anyway, I had one of those moments over an article that popped up because of the recent mention of peanut allergies in the news. Here's the part that made me wonder what they're smoking over at Johns Hopkins:

First on the experts’ agenda is "immunotherapy," which would involve exposing children to potential food allergens so they develop tolerance to them.

"The reality is we know exactly how to do that in mice and no idea how to do that in people," said Dr. Robert Wood, director of the pediatric allergy clinic at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore.

I am currently taking immunotherapy for foods as directed by my doctor, and it's working. I tolerate wheat again; someday I hope to be able to tolerate milk, but that's more of a long shot since I became allergic to it twenty-five years ago instead of last year. The upshot is that I'd completely forgotten that most doctors can't do anything for food allergies, and I wish I could grab all the moms with peanut-allergic kids and drag them over to my doctor, who has a lot of experience with anaphylaxis, except people don't really like it if you grab them.

In other news, it appears that tracking someone's cell phone isn't as hard as it sounds.