If you have allergies, you know exactly what life living with them is like. If you don’t have allergies – I am genuinely so freaking thankful that you don’t. I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemies. Seriously, not even that one guy…we all know who that guy is.
Why? I can imagine many people being absolutely gabsmocked I wouldn’t wish them on “that one guy.”
Let’s talk allergies. Hold onto your butts friends, this is a long post.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of my allergies:
Gold
Silver
Apples (raw)
Cherries (raw)
Chemical fragrances
Grass pollen
Tree pollen (especially oak trees and dogwoods)
Dandelion pollen
Some of the above aren’t life-threatening, and some could become so if I’m not careful. Also, these are the confirmed allergies. It doesn’t include intolerances to food that I’ve developed. Monitoring and mitigating these allergies is an all-day, everyday task, even if I don’t take my Sunshine’s allergies into account. For my environmental allergies alone, I have a daily regimen to keep them in check that alters depending on the season. If it’s spring when the oak trees are putting out their fronds, my regimen keeps me functional, NOT symptom-free.
That’s a huge difference. Due to the overlap of my allergies, I’m never, not a single minute of a single day, completely symptom-free. Symptom management is the name of the game, and avoidance doesn’t entirely work. The most insidious of these allergies, the one that ruins my day regularly is my allergy to chemical fragrances.
As I type this, I’m wearing a gorgeous jade necklace that my spouse bought me for Valentine’s Day. He spent an inordinate amount of time looking for jewelry that I could wear. It’s jade and stainless steel. Seems like it would tick off all the boxes, yeah?
He handed me the small black box in the evening, and when I opened the box, I sighed. I was immediately hit with a waft of fragrance. The entire of the inside of the box had been sprayed, including the necklace itself. I tried it on to see if it fit, and almost instantly, my neck started itching. My spouse and I spent time that night looking up the best way to clean jade. He cleaned the necklace twice before we thought it was clean enough to let dry overnight. Even the next day, I could still faintly smell the fragrance. All this for a necklace. A brand new necklace.
I used to live by thrifting. I was a poor college student. There was no better place to look for nice clothes I could afford. Even after my diagnosis, I still tried. I probably looked like a crazy woman, sniffing every article of clothing to determine whether or not I thought I could get the fragrances out if I bought it. After multiple failures and learning more about how things like fabric softeners work, I gave up. It was never worth the effort.
“Couldn’t you just wash the clothes over and over until the smell comes out?”
Not in my washer and dryer thanks. Fun fact: I can’t use shared washing machines and dryers. The washer is actually the less problematic of the two, and I could flush the washer multiple times with clean water or vinegar water. The dryer, however, is a lost cause. Those dryer sheets absolutely get into every vent, crevice, crack of the machine. Good luck cleaning all that crap out. You’d spend the cost of two brand new dryers to call in professionals to fully clean the thing out and still have issues (we asked dryer techs once). If I’m gonna get fragrance out of purchased clothes, it means hand-washing. Not worth the effort. Cheaper in the long run to buy new. New clothes, new washer/dryer.
I am so sensitive that if someone walks into my house wearing perfume, cologne, or just having bathed in strongly scented soaps, I know they’re there even if I’m on the other side of the house. Being next to such a person makes my breathing difficult, and don’t get me started on incense.
Except I’m now started.
Story Time!
My spouse and I own our house. We started looking for a house in 2013. We were living in an apartment. I loved our apartment, not gonna lie. I prefer apartment living overall for lots of reasons, but guess what? I can’t live in shared housing. Our downstairs neighbor at the time was a lovely gent who lived on his own and kept to himself. Unfortunately for me, he – like many many other people in the world – enjoyed burning incense in his home, and hot air rises. In this case, it rose through his ceiling and seeped into our apartment. Genuinely, I enjoyed the scent itself, but you know what didn’t? My lungs. And my skin.
And there was nothing I could do. Allergy medicine can only do so much. A high-end air purifier can only do so much. I certainly couldn’t go knock on my neighbor’s door and say, “Hey, is there any way I can convince you to stop burning incense in your own home?” Because shared housing generally means shared ventilation, changing units would be as effective as shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. The damn thing’s still sinking.
And I would still be reacting. We’re talking global, full-body reactions. As I am trying not to be too explicit, I am gonna talk around it. Think about the most sensitive parts of the body, especially for women. There’s a whole industry around keeping those parts “clean” and “healthy” (spoiler for those who have female reproductive organs: those products don’t help with anything – if anything they’ll make shit worse). Now think of a poison ivy rash. On those sensitive bits.
Yeah. That.
Now take all that and consider a loving marriage and what complications that type of health issue would cause for an intimate relationship.
Fun right?
As much as I loved apartment living, I can’t do it. Until scientists figure out how to make my allergies to chemical fragrances go away (and I mean go away, not a new treatment for the symptoms), I won’t ever get to enjoy apartment living again.
End Story Time
And that is the central issue with allergies, with my allergies. I don’t get to ignore them, ever. As a result, I have rules for my house. As a result, knowing how much simpler and happier my life would be without them, I would wish for an end to them – for everyone in the world – if I could have one wish.
So friends: If you’re ever in the situation where you’re offering me something second-hand and I immediately ask about things like “what do you use to wash it,” please understand where I’m coming from. I don’t want to ever get into an argument about – for instance – why I can’t use just any brand of diapers (even though Sunshine is well out of diapers) ever again. I am tired of explaining why I can’t thrift for nice clothes as I bemoan the cost of brand-new jeans.
Come on Science. Help a lady out here!
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