Sheila's LiveJournal

Today's the day for some personal grumbling. The problems of the world can go to the back of the queue for a while. I'm tired of allergies.

A couple of years ago, I found out I was allergic to wheat – Wow! That explains why I had never been able to eat breakfast (toast, muffins, cereal, french toast, pancakes....) Okay, I adjusted; I could manage a very little bit of gluten (a small buttered crust of San Francisco Sourdough, hot from the oven, with the soft part pulled out, yum!) once in a while. But last night, the small amount of flour in the batter of my fish and chips just about did me in. I was up for two hours with nasty stomach pain that antacids can't touch (of course, since it isn't indigestion).

Several years ago while I was still teaching, I discovered I was allergic to chalk dust, and naturally the administration was very slow in replacing the chalk boards with the dry eraser kind. I think the money had to go to recarpeting the prez's office or something crucial like that. I wasn't too surprised because I'd also just recently found out that I was developing hay fever and dust allergies. Smoke from forest fires miles away give my lungs such a problem the docs suspect pneumonia until the X-rays come in.

Well that wasn't too much of a surprise because before *that* I'd found out I was allergic to bee and wasp venom (and also Greek mosquitoes – don't ask).

Looking back, there were other episodes of allergic reactions: I broke out in hives the first time I ate strawberries as a kid; I couldn't dab perfume behind my ears as a teenager going on a date because I had what seemed to be permanent red patches as a result; I developed a nasty skin rash on my hands from agricultural pesticides while working on the conveyor belt one summer in a Birds Eye Frozen Foods factory as a student. But I didn't put it all together until the wheat problem was diagnosed.

Now I'm the kind of person who believes in the religion of Modern Medicine, and I'm not a happy camper when the docs don't come up with the pill that fixes everything once and for all. And I'm also the kind of person who believes in learning valuable lessons from everything life throws at me.

So, I've learned already! What, you think I'm a slow learner? Come up with the pill!