![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Allergy vent... and allergy vent
Jan. 25th, 2023 08:03 pmOn Sunday night I closed the vent above my desk, put plastic over it and postal-taped all around the plastic. Then on Monday I sat there all day and didn't use a single tissue until about 5PM. Impressive and very, very suspicious.
On Tuesday morning I drove the squirrel's car to the allergy testing place, where they had me fill out a LOT of forms. Then they had me exhale as hard and completely as I could through a tube that measured my lung capacity (I did not feel good when they said it was a little low). Then they prickled my forearms with sixty different prickly tips covered with environmental allergens -- it felt like being pressed really hard with a hairbrush -- and left me alone for fifteen or twenty minutes with injunctions not to touch, rub or scratch, while my forearms basically caught fire with itching and started turning red. For those who've forgotten, my OCD compulsion is scratching, so resisting itches is NOT my strong point. Like, clinically not my strong point. I distracted myself as best I could by moving around, opening and closing my fists, and writing a card to my pen pal. Then they came back in and said "hey, you have a lot of allergies!" which was not comforting to me. But also maybe not a surprise in that moment, as my arms had developed a lot of mosquito-bite bumps in neat little rows. :(
There was a bit more -- they tried a bit harder with 13 or so things I hadn't reacted to, sticking them under the skin of my upper arm with a needle to try to get a reaction. We waited again but these mostly didn't react. In the meantime, they told me the deal: a lot of trees, a lot of grasses, some molds, cats, and dogs. I made the "you've got to be kidding" face at them. I asked about one bump from a comb device that mostly hadn't created bumps -- they checked and said "oh, that's cotton lint." Cotton lint!? WTF.
They let me take a picture of the full test results:
Of all that stuff, the strongest reactions were to ash, elm, aspergillus, mugwort, and grass mix. Given that it's winter, there's not much tree & grass action these days. But aspergillus is a genus consisting of several hundred mold species, and obviously my air vents are full of dust since we haven't cleaned them out in the 12 years since moving in. Then there are the cats, where we just increased our allergen load with the kitten acquisition.
Honestly, I've sniffled enough in the spring and the fall to half-know some of this stuff anyway, and the allergist said it's possible to have no real problems for a long time and then suddenly hit kind of a tipping-over point where you do have problems. She didn't tell me to stop sleeping with the cats, who seem to be the least of my problems, just said I was a good candidate for shots and for an inhaler. The shots are to be weekly for about seven months as they slowly build up the dosages, then monthly for a lot longer, and ugh... they sure seem like the right thing to do, but getting out to that place (Winchester) weekly seems prohibitively difficult. I might try to pursue treatment somewhere closer, like MGH, which I can get to by subway and where I hear they do a fine job.
I feel whiny: I don't want to be allergic to the whole world. And I didn't need any more projects that need time and attention weekly. What a stupid, high-maintenance pain. As for the inhaler, I'm now on the same thing my cat is on; just at a higher, human-sized dose.
It's a lot of bad news in one week. Just gotta deal with it.
On Tuesday morning I drove the squirrel's car to the allergy testing place, where they had me fill out a LOT of forms. Then they had me exhale as hard and completely as I could through a tube that measured my lung capacity (I did not feel good when they said it was a little low). Then they prickled my forearms with sixty different prickly tips covered with environmental allergens -- it felt like being pressed really hard with a hairbrush -- and left me alone for fifteen or twenty minutes with injunctions not to touch, rub or scratch, while my forearms basically caught fire with itching and started turning red. For those who've forgotten, my OCD compulsion is scratching, so resisting itches is NOT my strong point. Like, clinically not my strong point. I distracted myself as best I could by moving around, opening and closing my fists, and writing a card to my pen pal. Then they came back in and said "hey, you have a lot of allergies!" which was not comforting to me. But also maybe not a surprise in that moment, as my arms had developed a lot of mosquito-bite bumps in neat little rows. :(
There was a bit more -- they tried a bit harder with 13 or so things I hadn't reacted to, sticking them under the skin of my upper arm with a needle to try to get a reaction. We waited again but these mostly didn't react. In the meantime, they told me the deal: a lot of trees, a lot of grasses, some molds, cats, and dogs. I made the "you've got to be kidding" face at them. I asked about one bump from a comb device that mostly hadn't created bumps -- they checked and said "oh, that's cotton lint." Cotton lint!? WTF.
They let me take a picture of the full test results:
- Trees -- allergic to ash, elm, beech, cottonwood. Not to red mulberry, red oak, birch or hickory.
- Grass/Plants -- allergic to mugwort and "grass mix", less so to ragweed (they had to go intradermal for that), probably not to cocklebur, E Plantain whatever that is, lamb's quarter, pigweed.
- Moldy Stuff -- allergic to alternarium, aspergillus, fusarium, mucor, dust, dust mites. Not to cladosporium or pennicillum.
- Animals -- allergic to dogs and cats. Not to guinea pig, rabbit, mouse, rat, horse, mosquito.
- Random Shit -- allergic to cotton lint (wtf). Not to kapok seed, velvet grass, pyrethrum, feather mix, goose feather, "Insect (Cr)", duck feather.
- Weeds Etc -- not allergic to dandelion, pine mix, tobacco leaf, T Rubrum, sugarbeet, nettle, botrytis cinerea, S Cerevisiae.
Of all that stuff, the strongest reactions were to ash, elm, aspergillus, mugwort, and grass mix. Given that it's winter, there's not much tree & grass action these days. But aspergillus is a genus consisting of several hundred mold species, and obviously my air vents are full of dust since we haven't cleaned them out in the 12 years since moving in. Then there are the cats, where we just increased our allergen load with the kitten acquisition.
Honestly, I've sniffled enough in the spring and the fall to half-know some of this stuff anyway, and the allergist said it's possible to have no real problems for a long time and then suddenly hit kind of a tipping-over point where you do have problems. She didn't tell me to stop sleeping with the cats, who seem to be the least of my problems, just said I was a good candidate for shots and for an inhaler. The shots are to be weekly for about seven months as they slowly build up the dosages, then monthly for a lot longer, and ugh... they sure seem like the right thing to do, but getting out to that place (Winchester) weekly seems prohibitively difficult. I might try to pursue treatment somewhere closer, like MGH, which I can get to by subway and where I hear they do a fine job.
I feel whiny: I don't want to be allergic to the whole world. And I didn't need any more projects that need time and attention weekly. What a stupid, high-maintenance pain. As for the inhaler, I'm now on the same thing my cat is on; just at a higher, human-sized dose.
It's a lot of bad news in one week. Just gotta deal with it.
