Allergy Season

Every year I can tell exactly what day it started. This year it was August 18th. I can tell simply by the start of some sneezing, eye irritation, and sinus drainage. To verify, the next day I went online to see what the pollen counts were for this area, but was surprised to see "Low" on the site. But then I was exonerated the next morning, when the local newspaper confirmed a high weed pollen count.

My severe fall allergy curse has been with me my entire life. I've had the allergies as long as I can remember, and my parents once told me they first realized the problem when I was a toddler and showed the symptoms after they had taken me somewhere in the country one day.

An annual event for me up until I had my tonsils removed at 23 was the daily sneezing, running eyes and nose, and wheezing that began in mid August and continued into mid or late September. Inevitably, sometime in October I would come down with a case of Tonsilitis. It turns out that I probably should have had the tonsils out when I was very young, but doctors failed to catch the pattern of my annual bouts with tonsilitis and kept to the popular medical wisdom of the time, which was to avoid removing tonsils as much as possible.

Football camp was always a special challenge for me, especially through Jr. High (it wasn't called Middle School back then) and High School. There I was, on the worst days of 2-a-days, eyes swollen and watering so badly I could barely see. Sneezing regularly and trying to figure out what to do with the constant flow from my nose. It usually just ended up on my practice jersey. I probably would have been a better football player if there had just been a way to control the allergies back then.

I remember many nights suffering with coughing and asthma, all though for several years I didn't know it was asthma. Nighttime for me was worse than the day, because many nights I slept very little or not at all as I mostly tried to find a comfortable position that would let me breathe freely.

The culprits for me are ragweed, several varieties of grasses used in most lawns in Indiana, and the red oak tree. My condition is known forever as "hay fever", and nothing short of a hard frost could alleve my suffering.

When I was in my early 20's back in Ft. Wayne, I tried desensitization treatments. Every week I went at lunchtime to the doctor's office, where I got a little shot of all the bad stuff that cause my allergies. It usually itched and raised a welt, but that was about all - until that day they switched to the next vial.

The next vial had a slightly higher concentration of those allergens. I got the shot and waited the proscribed 10 minutes, which at first seemed routine. But after leaving the office and driving back to work, I began to feel very strange. My face felt overheated and my entire body began to itch. I began to feel spacy, and everything around me began to seem unreal, as in a dream.

This couldn't be good, so I went home, which was closest to where I was in the car at that time. Claudia immediately saw I was in trouble even before I said anything, and immediately loaded me back into the car and drove me back to the doctor's office. I was covered in red all over, my bronchials were swelling shut, and I couldn't see very well. I was feeling faint along with the feeling of my body being on fire.

The doctor immediately injected adrenalin, and kept me in the office for observation for awhile. Now my feelings of burning skin, itching, trouble breathing, etc., were quickly replaced with a racing heart and mind and a generally strange, "wired" feeling that's difficult to describe.

Later I met a widower who had lost his wife because of a bad reaction in a very similar desensitization program. So I thought it might be best to abandon that course of treatment and just find a way to make peace with my personal curse.

Today I am more careful this time of year to try to keep the symptoms at a minimum. The allergy medications are much better than they were 20 and 30 years ago, but I still prefer to stay off the drugs as much as possible. So I keep outdoor time to a minimum, especially in the country (which is harder to do now that we live on the farm). Air conditioning helps, and some dietary adjustments seem to help a little for some reason that escapes me. Strangely, during allergy season I crave ice cream more than any other time of year, but that's exactly the food that seems to make my symptoms worse.

All I hope for this season is the same as every allergy season: That it is relatively short and mild. Based on today's sneezing fits, it's not looking too promising.