Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Allergies

Is anyone in their various locations having as much trouble with seasonal allergies as me?

I'm on two different medications and I'm still all itchy, swollen, and watery eyed, stuffy and runny nosed, scratchy and itchy throated, stuffy headed, and exhausted.

I'm highly allergic to oak tree pollen... a fact we discovered only after moving into a house surrounded by the derned things.

It's bad enough that I can't go outside without a mask for weeks, and even then I have to limit it or I'll start sneezing my head off, getting lightheaded, and feeling generally crappy. The low levels I'm exposed to even indoors still manage to impact my sleep, too, as if I needed another thing messing that up.

Oh, and the best thing? We tend to be in Florida at the beginning of spring, helping Grandpa move back north. So we're there for pollen season down there. And then, just as it's winding down, we go back home... in time to hit the beginning of the season here. *sigh*

365 days a year for me It's all tolerable as long as I take my antihistamine. Even so, my eyes still water a lot, and people periodically think I'm crying. I can't tell you how many authority figures mistaked me for some kind of problem child growing up LOL.

You know... this whole allergy thing has always confused me.

What possible purpose could allergies serve? I can't walk outside because tiny specs of otherwise harmless material released every year by tree flowers cause this huge, nearly incapacitating reaction in my body.

Worse, there is a growing number of people out there who can literally die from ingesting not even a single peanut but a tiny sample of peanut molecules transferred to some food item or other that just happened to be processed in the same room as some peanuts intended for something else.

I mean, okay. Maybe there's some reason for a basic allergic reaction. Maybe it's a coincidental effect that happens when some beneficial mechanism is triggered by something that wasn't intended to set it off. But... come on. There is absolutely no call for reactions this strong to random stuff that wouldn't otherwise hurt you.

Purpose, Paul?



I once read an article where a gynecologist specialized on deliveries said that it is all wrong to give pregnant women an enema before they give birth. (Sorry about the yuck factor here, folks.) Anyway, according to this doctor, before we became so incredibly civilized and hygienic, women had delivered babies for hundreds of thousands of years, pushing out some feces while pushing out their babies, putting some brown stuff on their newborns. (Yucky, I know.) But according to this doctor, some feces on your face as you enter this world is just what you need to kick-start your immune system and make it recognize the things your immune system should be on the lookout for.

Purely and simply, we have an immune system which is programmed to fight things. If we don't give it the right things to fight, it will attack the wrong things... making us sick in the process. Lots and lots of cleanliness is not always always a good thing! (Incidentally, in poor countries, where people live with a lot less soap and a lot more bacteria than we do, allergies tend to be rare.)

Ann

Interesting. And, I'm sure, symbolic of something or other that I'm not going to think about too much.

Incidentally, did I mention that I'm also severely allergic to myself?

Almost forgot about that bit of biological idiocy, but:

Yup. Mine attacks me. My hair follicles (which is why I'm bald), my pancreas (which is why I'm diabetic), etc etc (which is why I can't sleep and have arthritis-like joint and muscle issues and...)

Stupid autoimmunity .

I suffer from hayfever and asthma so if I have a bad flare up I'll suffer an asthma attack. I'm usually good I take the medication at night thoug. The antihistamines really make me drowsy (not unusual for me I get knocked out by most medications.) I take ventolin, seratide and flixotide for the asthma and also a steriod based nasal spray.

It's winter now so no problems at the moment come spring and summer then I'll start showing symptoms. The doctor really chastises me over not taking the medication especially when I suffered from the itchy eye syndrome I was on eye drops for days because of it, but I hate medication and I hate going to the doctor even more. I have to be practically in really in trouble to want to go.

What's unusual about me is that I never had any problems when I was a kid I didn't start having problems until I had a bad chest infection a few years ago. I actually heard once that the reason alergies and asthma is so common in western countries is because of the quality of life. We are apparently too clean don't know exactly how much research was put into that one, but that's what the report said.

My allergies have been horrible this year, and my medicine hasn't been helping me. And unfortunately the older I get, the worse my sinus problems seem to be. I've been stuffed up and feel like my head is a pressure cooker for a couple months now.

I typically have allergies year round, but they are worse in the spring and even more horrible in the fall.

I remember when I was pregnant reading books about how to avoid your kid from having allergies. They highly recommended that your child be around animals the first 6-12 months of their life. My older sister was appalled that I was letting such dirty creatures around my child (especially since they would lick her--such horrors! ) So, my daughter doesn't seem to have allergies that badly...she seems to have some, but no where near as bad as me or her father. It's been interesting to watch everyone tell me I should be putting her on drugs the moment she sniffles (which isn't alot). I'm all for boosting her immune system naturally unless it gets too uncomfortable.

Jo

Oh yeah, the hygienic hypothesis. Did you know, Ann, that there are about just as many clinical studies telling you this hypothesis is wrong? Which leaves me just as clueless as I was before.

I forgot to add to my original post that I've had horrible bout of sneezing too.

My worst time is the spring and the trees are releasing pollen. I had trouble when I was younger, which got worse as I became a teenager, and even worse now that I'm an adult. I used to go for allergy injections from middle school through high school, but stopped when I went to college. I shudder to think what I'd be like if I hadn't had those injections.

Last night I actually slept with a face mask thing, you know those white masks that you see people wearing when they're cutting wood to avoid breathing in the saw dust... I woke up relatively unstuffy and with a non-tingly and non-runny nose... I took it off so I could have breakfast and I started sneezing within a couple minutes. I've been wearing one at work and around the house too. Luckily, I work in a boarding kennel so it's not such a big deal to walk around wearing it, the dogs don't care, lol. Since classes are out for the semester, and I'm not taking any summer session classes, I don't have to worry about looking like a fool walking around campus.

I'm sure cleanliness is not the only, and quite possibly not the most important, reason for why people are so much more allergic these days than they were back in the sixties when I was a kid. (However, allergies existed back in the sixties, too. But back then allergies were collectively known as "hay fever", because it was taken for granted that an allergic person was allergic to pollen only. A small boy I knew back in the early sixities almost died because it took his doctors that long to realize that the kid was allergic to nuts. Honestly, a nut allergy... who in the early sixities could have imagined that such an allergy was even possible?)

My sister-in-law and my brother are both allergic, so any children they had would be genetically disposed to have allergies. But Ingela, my sister-in-law, had heard that you can reduce the risk for allergies in your children if the mother is very careful with what she eats while she is nursing her babies. So while Ingela was nursing my niece and my nephew, she didn't eat anything that contained milk, eggs or fish. And neither my niece, who is eighteen, nor my nephew, who is sixteen, has ever had any allergies.

Ann

Yeah, I heard that, too. And to add something, it obviously is better for babies if the sleep in a room that is not renovated.