Allergic to all the things.

[trinityvixen]

I had some really bizarre outbreaks of allergy attacks this fall, so I finally made an appointment for an allergy test, which I took this morning. The doctor was super chatty and nice, and he found it helpful that I was so specific about my symptoms and what I thought triggered them. Especially since, as it turns out, I was pretty dead-on about what I was allergic to. Except for my supposition about molds being the reason I was really sniffly one rainy day, I was right about being allergic to trees and dust. (My two most memorable  experiences recently were when I was trapped in a park with flirting trees and after I came back from the shelter after changing many a clay litter.) I am also apparently allergic to every grass ever. My right arm was a mass of itchy bumps by the time the test was done, with only a few trees being non-allergenic.

One thing to watch out for, he said, was my slight but negligible (at least in comparison to the huge welts the grasses raised) allergy to cats. He thinks I might be one of those people whose been conditioned to accept cats but that time away from them will probably exacerbate the condition. Basically, I tolerate the cats because I'm around them all the time; leave for a week or two, and I'll probably come back to some reactions, though they should die down. I'll go back in a couple of weeks to do the second round of testing (higher concentrations of the stuff I had negative reactions to in order to be sure they were actually negative and not just sub-threshold) to find out for sure. I will take this as cart blanche to always have cats. Doctor's orders.

In other annoying news, one of the deal sites that I get e-mail from sent me an e-mail this morning admonishing me to go to the salon for a facial/eyebrow-plucking so that I don't have to hear about it from mother. I'm incredibly affronted by this assumption, not just for the sexism inherent in it, but also on behalf of my mother who is so awesomely not that person, I want to scream. DIAF, e-mail.

Comments

[fairest.livejournal.com]

I'm terrified of going to the allergist. I'm convinced that once I learned for sure what I was allergic to, my body would start insisting it have allergic reactions to those things all the time. Right now it's pretty quiescent unless I'm upstate or on a mountaintop in Japan, so I've been leaving well enough alone.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I see your point. There's actually really very little this changes for me since I'm still so botanically inept, I'll never be able to spot and cross myself against the trees I'm allergic to. (To say nothing of the grasses.) On the other hand, it's so very useful for me to know about not only cats and dogs, given my career aspirations, but to know about dust. Next time I volunteer, I'll be sure to inoculate myself against an allergen and, hopefully, suffer less as a result.

[lithoglyphic.livejournal.com]

I'm allergic to Texas. Haven't figured out what part exactly, but mesquite is a front-running candidate.