My life's prevailing characteristic right now is exhaustion. It got to the point of being alarming, a week or two ago, how I could get more than enough sleep and still not find the energy to so much as get off my couch, except to get to bed early. I had my annual physical last week and I asked the doctor to check my iron and thyroid, because this just cannot be normal.
(My doctor, by the way, thinks that I am something of a hypochondriac, largely because I am, also because I save up every ailment all year long in a list in my planner and when I get to the annual physical I spew them all out in a breathless litany, leading her last year to say, after I detailed my frequent headaches and how sometimes I feel like I can't enunciate clearly anymore and I probably have a brain tumor, don't I? "Maybe you should try speaking more slowly." It's a good thing that she also likes to travel, giving us something to talk about other than my pretend diseases.)
After the lab stuck a needle into my arm to check the iron and thyroid, of course, I remembered that I get this tired at this time every year. It's the allergies, stupid. This is the first time I've managed to time my visit to the doctor with the worst of the allergy season (starts March 1st around here, like someone wrote it in the planner), and she took one look in my nose and said, "Hm. Do you have trouble breathing sometimes? Because your nasal passages are really swollen."
(Side note the second: do not ask someone if they have trouble breathing sometimes, due to a physically documentable symptom. It will result in the person periodically feeling like s/he can't breathe, whether or not said feeling is justified. I can breathe. It's just that now, sometimes, since she asked, I wonder if maybe I can't, and that's not a good path to be trodding.)
Until she said that, I kinda sorta thought I had made up the allergies, all symptoms aside. I was exposed to plenty of diseases growing up: malaria, parasites, worms, bacteria... come on. I grew up in Liberia. I played in rivers and I ate dirt. I was exposed to enough diseases to last me a lifetime. Isn't that supposed to prevent your immune system from going bonkers and attacking innocent pollen? But the miserable fact is that Gone West makes me sicker than Liberia and Sudan put together. And I speak as someone who allegedly had malaria in Sudan.
Regardless, apparently allergies are real. I really don't know that I believed in them, but my pounding head every time I venture outside this time of year convinces me otherwise (not that it stops me from going outside).
So the doctor gave me some nasal spray that is supposed to help, after a week or two of buildup, but even then it's an experiment! And if it doesn't work we'll try something else!
You won't tell that I'm supplementing with over-the-counter allergy meds, right? A little fake Zyrtec takes the edge right off the headache.
Nasal spray. Puh-lease.
(My doctor, by the way, thinks that I am something of a hypochondriac, largely because I am, also because I save up every ailment all year long in a list in my planner and when I get to the annual physical I spew them all out in a breathless litany, leading her last year to say, after I detailed my frequent headaches and how sometimes I feel like I can't enunciate clearly anymore and I probably have a brain tumor, don't I? "Maybe you should try speaking more slowly." It's a good thing that she also likes to travel, giving us something to talk about other than my pretend diseases.)
After the lab stuck a needle into my arm to check the iron and thyroid, of course, I remembered that I get this tired at this time every year. It's the allergies, stupid. This is the first time I've managed to time my visit to the doctor with the worst of the allergy season (starts March 1st around here, like someone wrote it in the planner), and she took one look in my nose and said, "Hm. Do you have trouble breathing sometimes? Because your nasal passages are really swollen."
(Side note the second: do not ask someone if they have trouble breathing sometimes, due to a physically documentable symptom. It will result in the person periodically feeling like s/he can't breathe, whether or not said feeling is justified. I can breathe. It's just that now, sometimes, since she asked, I wonder if maybe I can't, and that's not a good path to be trodding.)
Until she said that, I kinda sorta thought I had made up the allergies, all symptoms aside. I was exposed to plenty of diseases growing up: malaria, parasites, worms, bacteria... come on. I grew up in Liberia. I played in rivers and I ate dirt. I was exposed to enough diseases to last me a lifetime. Isn't that supposed to prevent your immune system from going bonkers and attacking innocent pollen? But the miserable fact is that Gone West makes me sicker than Liberia and Sudan put together. And I speak as someone who allegedly had malaria in Sudan.
Regardless, apparently allergies are real. I really don't know that I believed in them, but my pounding head every time I venture outside this time of year convinces me otherwise (not that it stops me from going outside).
So the doctor gave me some nasal spray that is supposed to help, after a week or two of buildup, but even then it's an experiment! And if it doesn't work we'll try something else!
You won't tell that I'm supplementing with over-the-counter allergy meds, right? A little fake Zyrtec takes the edge right off the headache.
Nasal spray. Puh-lease.
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