Allergy Skin Test? Mix the Reagent Yourself

Since modern medicine was handling this, he naturally had to follow modern medical thinking. Gret steadied himself and carefully examined the child again. His earlier observations had been correct: the child's face was swollen, and wheals were visible on his face and hands. Allergy was the primary suspicion. He turned to the farmwoman who had brought the child in and continued questioning her:

"Did he eat any strange fruit? Pick any flowers? Where did he go to play this afternoon?"

"How could he have been playing?! Little Remy is such a sensible child! He's been helping out at home since two years ago!"

Uh... my apologies. Gret wiped away a cold sweat. His memories of the original owner's childhood had not fully connected yet, so he could not recall it for the moment. But in his previous life, wasn't seven or eight still elementary school age?

Carrying little schoolbags to school every day, they had not even begun to think about how to blow up the school yet!

Still, Gret knew perfectly well how mischievous seven- or eight-year-old children could be. Back when he worked in the emergency department, parents rushed in carrying their children every day. Injuries, illnesses, all kinds of absurd causes that practically challenged the limits of human imagination. Sometimes adults could not think of something, but the child's companions might know—

"Were there any children working with him? Could you call them over and ask?"

Gret asked patiently. Before the farmwoman could answer, Uncle Edmond, the farmer holding the child beside her, spoke up:

"Yes, yes, yes! Two or three of them! —What are you standing around for? Go get them!"

Someone immediately took off running. Gret frowned and continued racking his brain, considering other possible causes. Meanwhile, the priest who had finished examining the child's throat wandered over out of boredom.

"What are you asking all that for?"

Gret: "..."

To identify the allergen!

Gret bit his tongue and barely stopped the words that had reached his lips. Allergy was an utterly ordinary term in his previous life; even non-doctors knew what it meant. But saying it in this unfamiliar otherworld...

Gret was one hundred percent certain that this curious priest before him would definitely dig to the bottom of it. If he kept asking, how was Gret supposed to explain it?

—Hypersensitivity, also known as an allergic reaction, refers to an abnormal adaptive immune response in which the body suffers physiological dysfunction or tissue and cellular damage after stimulation by certain antigens?

Simple, right? Clear, right? It was only one sentence in the textbook...

Actually explaining it could kill someone!

Forget this otherworld. Even in Gret's previous life, if you asked someone outside the medical profession to explain the word "allergy," you could put all fifty-three medical textbooks before them. They would frantically flip through them for half an hour, then shout:

"Which book even talks about allergies?"

That was right. Half an hour, and they still would not have figured out which book allergies belonged in...

Fortunately, Gret had been the deputy director of an emergency department in his previous life. He had plenty of experience communicating with patients and their families. After organizing his wording, he answered slowly:

"I'm asking these questions to find out whether the child ate, drank, or touched something his body can't tolerate."

"Poisoned?"

"Not poisoned..."

Brother, who cast that Detoxification Spell just now? Wasn't it you?

After spending ages explaining the outward signs of this thing called "allergy," sweating all over in the process, the child's daytime playmates were finally brought over. There were three in all. The oldest was not yet ten, while the youngest looked only four or five. Gret carefully asked them the same questions again and, sure enough, learned something different:

"It was salted fish! The salted fish hanging from the beam! I saw Remy break off a piece!"

"You're talking nonsense! Our Remy is the best-behaved child! He never steals food!"

The farmwoman sprang up like a mother beast protecting her cub, baring her teeth and brandishing her claws, her voice shrill. Mothers screamed, children ran, men shouted them down. The hall descended into chaos, and the noise soared to one hundred and twenty decibels again.

Gret broke into a cold sweat. Amid the uproar filling the hall, he shouted with all his strength:

"Stop arguing! —Someone bring that salted fish over here!"

No matter how strongly he suspected the salted fish was responsible, no doctor in modern medicine would dare make a diagnosis without testing it. Gret held a salted fish in his left hand and a bowl of water in his right, looking from one to the other—

"What kind of fish is this?"

Forgive him. In his previous life, he only knew how to eat fish. He had never bought it, nor could he cook it. If a cooked dish were placed before him, he could still identify what kind of fish it was. But a raw fish lying in front of him, well...

No chance. Couldn't recognize it. Goodbye.

Fortunately, if he did not recognize it, someone else did. The Spring Goddess's priest poked his head over, studied it with great interest for a moment, and confidently reached a conclusion:

"It's cod. —So this thing caused the trouble?"

Cod was exactly what he had expected. Gret nodded inwardly. People in this inland region normally could not eat sea fish, so having an allergic reaction after eating it once in a while was perfectly normal. He smiled and nodded at the priest.

"I think it's quite likely. But we still need to verify it."

"How do we verify it? —Have the child eat it again?"

"..."

Gret broke into a cold sweat.

"His throat is swollen like that. Even if you make him eat it, can he swallow it?"

"Then what do we do?"

As for how to test it, generations of doctors in his previous life had already paved the way for those who came after. Doctors did not need to worry about it at all. If they suspected an allergy, they simply sent the patient for a skin test.

It cost a few dozen yuan. Prick the arm twice, apply a drop of antigen, and get the result within half an hour. But now, now...

To perform a skin test, he first needed an antigen!

Sterile antigens with no obvious toxic side effects and measured protein content came in box after box in the laboratory, seemingly within easy reach. But if there was no ready-made antigen product and it had to be extracted from raw materials...

Gret's specialty in his previous life had been clinical medicine, not pharmacy. Still, he had heard his pharmacy classmates complain bitterly about extracting it themselves for research projects. They had to chop the fish meat, grind it with liquid nitrogen, add acetone to remove the fat, stir it, let it sit, put it into a centrifuge...

Going through the entire process would take days and nights at the very least, leaving them so busy and disheveled that their features seemed crooked. As for how many drugs and instruments the process required, that went without saying.

In his previous life, all sorts of seemingly ordinary conditions had been supported by the nation's powerful industrial capacity. But in this otherworld, the only thing Gret could be certain of was this:

What he could currently accomplish was only the first step of the first stage in preparing an antigen.

—Chop up the fish meat and soak it in water...

That was all.

Then he would skip directly to the final step of the skin test.

"Bring me two needles! And another bowl of water!"

On the child's left and right forearms, he placed a drop each of plain water and water mixed with fish meat. Then, through the droplets, he gently pricked the skin with two needles, breaking the skin without drawing blood. Gret held his own wrist and silently counted to sixty, wiped the droplets from both of the child's arms, and then—

"What do we do now?"

"Wait."

In a skin prick test, Type I hypersensitivity reactions—such as seafood allergies, nut allergies, and paint allergies—were observed twenty to thirty minutes after antigen stimulation. The child was temporarily out of danger, but the next stage of treatment had to wait for the test result. For now, all they could do...

Was wait.

He looked left, then right, sitting where he was with nothing to do.

Gret: "..."

No way. We have to wait half an hour. Is no one going to feed me?

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