Please excuse this, as it was written in an allergy haze…

Tomorrow I get to go back to the United States.  I am excited for several reasons, but one of them is that I get to go to the doctor and figure out what the hell is wrong with me.  When I first got here, I had this awful cough that lingered for a month and a half.  Now the cough has given way to incessant sneezing, sniffling, and bleary eyes.  I am beginning to suspect I had an infection which then went away only to be replaced by allergies.  I have no idea why, because there are no goddam flowers here.   And the best part is that the allergy meds I brought from the States are not working.

So many people have allergies, yet I think people who don’t suffer from them fail to understand exactly how shitty it is to have them.  Let me put it in perspective for you…imagine having something like a cold for roughly 4 months total of every year.  Because you’ll have periods of time where you feel normal, imagine nobody giving a fuck that you’re sick, and expecting you to perform at 100% anyways.   And imagine being instructed to take medicine almost year-round even when you don’t feel bad, because you never know exactly when you’ll start feeling bad.

I hate commercials for allergy meds.  They make it look so easy; at first the world is horrible and allergy-fogged, but once you take Allegra/Nasonex/Claritin/Zyrtec/Rhinocort the fog lifts!  and everything is beautiful!  and you can smell the flowers! and go jogging with your dog!  Everyone can have a quick fix for their allergic misery!!  Well let me tell you a little something. I have tried every single one of those medications, only to have them stop working after one or two seasons.  The only way to get effective usage out of them is to take them in combination and rotate them every few seasons.

So what’s the big deal, you ask?  Just play chemist and figure it out yourself, quit whining.  Well stfu, I did.  Unfortunately, because different places have different allergens, the perfect drug cocktail of 4392084093 drugs that I took in North Carolina doesn’t work for anyplace else.

Also, allergies have made me afraid to travel and afraid to move to new places.  Why?  Because I have no idea if I’ll be allergic to things in a new place that never existed in places I have been before.  And I won’t have the right drugs to combat them 9 out of 10 times.  For example, visiting Florida is one of the worst things I can do to myself.  I start sprouting hives, my eyes are so red it looks like I’m constantly high, I have to bust out an inhaler to stop coughing, and I’m sneezing so much I am living in a daze surrounded by Kleenex.  Taking all the OTC drugs I could find did not help me, neither did the pharmacy I brought for myself.

Anyways, I hope I go home and feel better.  I also hope my liver doesn’t die before I’m thirty.