Allergies Suck

Allergies suck. My allergies started the night before my first day of ninth grade, and I showed up to my first day of classes with puffy red eyes (that were sealed shut by eye boogers all night and that my mom stayed up at night wiping off with a warm, wet cloth – by the way, thanks for that, Mom). That was the year I got the perfect attendance certificate, and I’m not really sure why I bothered, or why it mattered so much to me that year; perhaps it was then that I learned to truly embrace my inner nerd, but since I still wasn’t a great student, I don’t think I truly ever acquired true nerdiness. Nope, I was a poser nerd.

But anyhow, as I was saying, somehow, I would have allergies every other year just in the fall, from right before school started until the first frost (making me forever wish for an early winter). My major allergy is to ragweed, and evidently they grow well only every other year. So on the one hand, I consider myself quite fortunate that my allergies only bug me every other year. But on the other hand, no medicine seems to have any effect, so I suffer through allergy season drug-free.

I know a lot of people have it worse than I do, and I appreciate how lucky I generally am, but evidently, I now also have allergies in the spring! This is a new discovery, and I figure at the age of 34 I should not be picking up new allergies. At least I don’t wear contacts anymore.

So why am I talking about allergies? Well, I’ve mentioned several times throughout this blog how lazy I am. So it seems kind of ironic, then, that my immune system is working needlessly, reacting to stimuli that aren’t supposed to make me sick. But then again, being a mom of two toddlers, I guess I do have a tendency to overreact to little things, so maybe I’m allergic to my kids. Hmmm…

So my purely non-medical mind thinks, then, that there should be some way to channel the power of allergies to fight AIDS and other immune deficiency ailments. Think about it: AIDS is when your body fails to fight off diseases. If you could inject allergy-fighting cells into the bloodstream, cells that could be programmed to be allergic to actual diseases (instead of wasting time reacting to ragweed and cat hairs), problem solved. A bit simplistic, maybe, but it sounds good, right? Of course, the medical-mind of my husband points out that they are completely different mechanisms and don’t inter-relate. Of course, I took one class of Biochemistry, and that was four days a week at 8:30 in the morning, while I commuted forty minutes each way (did I ever mention that I’m not a morning person?). Oh, and I squeaked by with a C. And then I changed majors. So clearly, my grasp of biochemical processes of the human body is not so strong.

But you know, being married to a doctor works for me. I can hear his stories, listen to his descriptions of the research he’s doing, and actually use the part of my brain that was stretched a bit during my pre-med days. And, if I don’t get it, it’s okay. I’m not going to fail, nobody’s going to die, and my husband doesn’t mind. I will never claim to have “special powers” or any extra medical knowledge just because I’m married to a physician, as some other people do. I mean, I am a more relaxed mom because, instead of calling my pediatrician every time my kid falls or bumps his head (which is, sadly, quite often), I can just ask my husband. “Do I need to go to the ER? Is there anything wrong? Should I give him some medicine?” If anything, I’m actually less capable of learning because I know I have this great resource for information. Part of what I learned in school is not just to memorize a bunch of data, but rather where to find information when I need it. And that’s what I do.

So I read the paper every day, usually just the Arts and Life section, starting with the comics, and moving on to the celebrity gossip, Dear Abby, and other fluff pieces. Then, if I have time, I move on to the front page section, and maybe even Metro, to learn what’s going on locally. Well, once a week, they have some little article about medicine, or home remedies, or something like that in the Arts section. And last week, it was talking about allergies. It mentioned that one thing you shouldn’t do is over-expose yourself to the allergen in the hopes of desensitizing yourself, because it doesn’t work. Okay, I could see how if you’re allergic to peanuts you shouldn’t eat a whole jar of peanut butter because it could kill you. And logically, it does make sense. But the problem is, if I’m allergic to something outside, it says I should stay indoors and run the air conditioner.

I have two problems with that. And I’m not even counting the fact that we don’t have central air, because I don’t really want to have air conditioning. I have a friend who keeps his house refrigerator-cold in the summer, so when we go over to his place, I have to take a sweatshirt along. Seriously, a sweatshirt on a 90-degree day! But, it’s his home and he gets to keep it like he likes it. He probably hates coming over to our house where we barely run our window units. No, my problems are that 1) I spend months of winter waiting for the warm weather to return. The number of sunny, 70-degree days in Cleveland is quite limited, and I’ll be darned if I have to miss them by sitting inside. It’s not like I have a job that requires me to go sit in an office all day; I’m a stay-at-home mom, for crying out loud. One of the perks is that I get to be indoors or outdoors whenever I darn well please (and I’m sorry about the use of the word “darn”; as I mentioned before, I’ve got two toddlers at home, and if talking like Ned Flanders keeps me from being a bad influence, since I can’t – and don’t want to – control the language of others around me, then it’s what I’ll have to do; besides, as a writer, I feel that using profanity is a crutch, and that a writer should be able to express strong emotions in a more creative manner, though I’m not claiming that “darn” is very creative). And 2) last summer, my husband and I built a playground for our kids in the backyard. It took about a month to put up (you know, from one of those kits you get at Lowe’s that you should be able to put together in a weekend), and it’s got a rock wall, two slides, and two swings (with room for one more that we’ll put in next summer). Leaving kids unsupervised for too long is a bad idea, so I kind of have to spend some time in the backyard with them. Oh, and we have a dog that needs a walk everyday (although he misses them if it’s raining). And we have a nice grill that we like to use when we can.

So really, it’s not practical to completely avoid the outdoors. Nor, I believe, is it healthy. We can’t really open up all the windows and let all the allergens inside, so our fresh air intake is limited to when we’re actually outside.

I know. I could get a mask, or some sort of air filter helmet that I could wear when I am outside. Yeah, that would work. My husband is allergic to cut grass, so for a while, he would mow the lawn wearing a surgical mask he got from the hospital. I figured it was a small sacrifice for me to make to actually mow my own lawn, so I did it for a while. It was kind of fun, making different patterns in the grass – diagonals, spirals, stripes in all directions. But then, mowing the lawn when seven months pregnant isn’t so wise, and then trying to find the right time to mow when you have a kid around is also tough, and even harder when you have two, and so we hire a company to come do it for us now. It is, as my husband says, why we make money. Because really, you can only buy so much stuff. After a while, you’re going to run out of places to put it. You may as well make your life easier.

So while my eyes may itch, and I may sneeze every now and then, I refuse to let my allergies control me. I just better learn what the heck ragweed looks like; for all I know, I’m probably letting it grow in my garden or eating it in some mixed green salad (for those who know me, you know that’s highly unlikely, considering how little salad I eat).