All choked up

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

I'm sending out a sympathy letter this week. Maybe I'm feeling sorry for myself, but if I am, it's because misery loves company.

I went most of my life without any problems from allergies, but man, they're pounding me now, sapping my strength, depressing my metabolism, and fouling my mood. I think they started about 15 years ago when the feds stopped managing public lands and the wildfires increased. I know a lot of you are feeling similarly grouchy. When people used to complain about allergies to me, I didn't quite understand their suffering. So this is probably karmic retribution.

Does anyone know anything that works? I've tried most of the over the counter drugs, but I can't take them because they mess with my ability to think and my attention to detail, which, all evidence to the contrary, I need to do my job. I know going in that I can't take anything that has a “D” in it (Claritin-D, for example), because I can't handle the pseudoephedrine, which messes with my sleep, compounding the fuzzy-headedness.

I've noticed that sensitivity to one thing—say the haze in the air from these summer wildfires—seems to enhance my sensitivity to other things, like pine pollen and cat dander. This seems to go against what's taken as conventional wisdom that exposure decreases the immune system's reaction, which is the argument toward consumption of local bee honey and homeopathic treatments. While I haven't spent much time researching the mainstream science or folk traditions, I can see that treatment is the American conflict between covering up symptoms and curing the root of the disease. In other words, the allergic reaction is the body's attempt to expel a toxin or irritant, so treating the symptom may delay the body's adaptation to the environmental factor.

Whatever. That logic takes me back to the idea of exposing myself to the irritants throughout the year, instead of just in the summer when the pines release their pollen and the wildfires fill our air with who knows what.