| Cathy Weeks 2005-07-31, 10:48 pm |
| Hi all,
A year ago, I was stung by two yellow jackets, and wound up in the ER.
I was tested 6 weeks later, and found that I'm allergic to bees, wasps,
yellow jackets, and yellow and white hornets.
I started immunotherapy in late January. I'm STILL working up to my
maintenance dose, 25+ weeks into this. I've been doing this religiously
every week. It's supposed to take only 12 weeks!!
I started getting local reactions about half way through the therapy -
I get big red marks surrounding the injection site, usually two inches
across (often bigger).
Right after the injection, the red mark is the size of an apple, and it
goes down by the 24 hour mark to much smaller - usually an oval 1.5" x
2" across, and sometimes a little bigger. It's not raised, and if
there is some hardness, it's gone by the 24 hour mark. It is hot to the
touch and a bit itchy for a few days. The marks sometimes last a
couple of weeks (though very faded by that point).
My allergist is worried that I'm going to wind up with a systemic
reaction - and his initial recomendation was that instead of 1.0 CC as
my maintenance dose, that we make it .5 ml/cc, that most people are
protected by that amount. I'm at .4 right now (third week in a row, and
still getting big marks).
Anyway, we elected to keep going to 1.0 but increase my dosage more
slowly. .1 cc increases instead of .2.
Anyway, I was wondering if people have experienced this before and what
they did about it.
Cathy Weeks.
|