I'm still battling hives, and after a week of scratching as I haven't been able to take any medication for my hives, I finally had a skin test done. The way they do a skin test is to write a grid all across your back and stick you with a bunch of different needles - by my count it was about 342 dozen painful pricks or so. The pricks up near the shoulders are relatively pain free. They are nice enough to start you out up there, but as the endless pricking continues, the lower ones hurt a lot and a number of them sent chills all throughout my body.
When your back is completely covered in small nicks of blood, then you have to wait twenty minutes and not scratch, even though almost immediately that is the only thing you want to do. This is when my long battle with hives has come in handy. I've gotten to the point where I usually don't think about scratching when I itch, which is a little messed up. My experience with the skin test yesteday is that the nurse is nice enough to check back in every so often with friendly reminders that you itch all over. "Oh, it looks like you have a few spots that really itch! No scratching! Fifteen more minutes!" I think she enjoys the torture.
My allergies include ragweed, dust mites, some sort of mold, and yes, cockroaches. I've never had seasonal allergies so ragweed was surprising. The dust mites, the doctor's free brochure tells me, are ugly little things that accumulate in my mattress. I first learn this during my brief time selling vacuums and quickly recall that dust mites excrete ten times their own body weight each and every day! Mold and cockroaches I'm sure that I'm around, but I almost never see them.
Anyways, the good doctor concludes that my hives are not an allergic reaction. What this means is that my body is causing the hives and I just have to live with it, for up to fifteen years, at which point it will be 2023 and I'll be comforted by my flying car and robotic housekeeper.
I also have a minor allergy to my cat, which still has no name, but isn't going anywhere.
Or at least that's what my wife says.
2 comments:
you know you love the cat.
and you didn't specify that you're only allergic to American cockroaches, not Germans. That's very important.
So your allergies are relatively normal; well except the cockroach one - that's just weird. But I guess now you can't have that cockroach farm you've always wanted.
Seriously though, what happens in 15 years. People over 40 don't get hives?
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