00:00 ALEX: I just was basically starving myself
to death because food made me hurt and feel so sick.
00:11 COMM: Nineteen-year-old Alex Visker is allergic
to the proteins in foods.
Just tasting a mouthful can cause extreme nausea, crippling stomach pain, or worse.
00:22 ALEX: On a day to day basis I can't eat any
food because every single food that I've tried makes me sick, or puts me in anaphylaxis.
Which is when your body has a systemic reaction and the throat swells closed and you can't
breathe.
00:38 COMM: The only way he can get the nutrition
he needs is through a feeding tube directly in his stomach.
The cost of his food formula and medications is a staggering $7,000 a mont and there is
still no official diagnosis for his condition.
00:52 JODIE: It's heartbreaking, as a parent you
want to fix it, you want to find answers.
00:59 JODIE: From the time he was really young as
we look back he had a lot of symptoms, nausea, stomach pain, headaches, bone pain, muscle
pain, it's one of the reasons why it was so difficult to pin point what was happening
with him.
At one point he actually was having stomach convulsions so bad that we took him up to
Primary Children's to the emergency room and it just started to progress so that he started
to eat less and less food, he started to be sick more, he started to spend days in bed
and miss school.
01:29 COMM: And it isn't just food that Alex is
allergic to.
He also has reactions to perfumes, paints, cleaners and air fresheners.
He even had toy give up playing saxophone and clarinet, as putting the reeds in his
mouth made him ill.
01:42 ALEX: It's changed a lot of things for me,
I've had to re-think how I'm going to do a lot of things and make it work for me.
01:48 COMM: Alex's parents have taken him to dozens
of doctors specialists who couldn't provide any answers for his mysterious illness.
01:56 JODIE Being undiagnosed is one of the hardest
things there is, because you have no support group, people don't believe you, they just
think you're crazy.
02:04 KEVIN: Y'know, he's just resilient from a
day to day, he can not feel well, y'know you wake him up in the morning because he wants
to get up and going and some days he just can't get out of bed.
02:16 COMM: For the last couple of years Alex has
been seeing Dr. Gerald Gleich, an expert in allergies and immunological conditions.
02:23 DR.
GLEICH: In terms of the commonness of what Alex suffers from, it is quite rare.
I don't think we know how rare.
There is another disease which is related and that's eosinophilic oesophagitis where
patients react to food and get inflammation of their swallowing tube, oesophagus.
There's a great deal of research being done.
02:49 COMM: He now takes a combination of allergy
medications, acid reducers, and drugs for masked cell activation disorder.
02:55 ALEX: Every two weeks I get the shots that
are called Xolair, it's used to treat chronic hives and asthma, chromyl sodium and Ketotifen
which are mass cell stabilisers.
And the Ketotifen is an antihistamine.
Then I'm on the Famotodine.
Then I take Aller Flex and I take Benadryl as needed.
It overall makes me feel better.
03:15 COMM: Alex gets his nutrients to a feeding
tube direct to his stomach, and lives off an elemental formula containing no whole proteins.
But he tries to keep meal times as normal as possible.
03:27 ALEX: I sometimes I will cook food, I have
a girlfriend and I cook for her I sit at the dinner table with my family and I have my
tube out and I pour my food in and enjoy the conversation.
I've always wanted my family to know that even though I can't eat food I've always wanted
them to not like feel super bad.
03:46 COMM: Many of Alex's symptoms are now under
control but the $7,000 per month for his medication and food formula has exhausted his college
fund.
However online donations might help him secure his further education and future.
03:59 ALEX: My hope is that I can do some programming,
be able to get a job from home and eventually get a family.
04:06 JODIE: We would hope for a cure or for him
to be healthy again.
I don't know whether that's a reality or not.
Next best case scenario would be to just find the very best way to be able to manage the
illness and hope that there are people out there with enough compassion to give him a
chance.
04:24 ALEX: After being on medications and being
able to have more of a life again, I'm grateful that I have what I have.