Today's Friday Five is all about the bane of my existance - seasonal allergies. 1. Do you suffer from seasonal allergies? Any other kinds? Seasonal - absolutely. I definitely react to pollen, privet, and all kinds of other blooming mess. I am sort-of allergic to cats as well. This one has developed in the past 8 or so years (when I went to college) but it doesn't bother me too much.
2. What kind of symptoms do you experience during your allergic reactions? I get the traditional sneezing, stuffy/runny nose, headache, and sometimes have the watery eyes. For the most part my reactions are exceptionally debilitating, but this year has been worse than normal.
3. How do you manage your allergies? Normally I just sort of tolerate them and try to avoid whatever is setting me off. This year I have had to try and avoid stuff AND take a nice handful of medication. I should probably look into other stuff because this stuff clearly isn't working as well as I would like!
4. What is the strangest allergy you've ever heard of? I don't know that this is the strangest I've ever heard of but definitely the strangest I have experienced - When I was in high school I had an allergic reaction to pizza sauce! I broke out into AWFUL hives and was miserable for several days. It was years before I would eat pizza with sauce again and to this day I generally prefer my pizza without tomato sauce!
5. How do you feel about school/social policies that are banning peanuts/other allergens? As I have clearly demonstrated with "the pizza incident", you can't ever avoid everything that might ever cause a reaction in somebody, and I think social policies attempting to ban stuff like that is ridiculous. I do think it should be disclosed, but if you are an adult and you know you're allergic to something, then you have to be responsible about taking care of yourself and avoiding it. It's not everyone else's job to take care of you. On some level I understand schools taking precautions, but I think doing it on a "what if" basis is also a bit much. I'm much more understanding of an individual teacher having a "no peanut" policy for the classroom if he/she knows a particular student has a severe allergy simply because kids aren't alway going to be responsible about it or totally understand the consequences, plus you don't ever want to be the kid who always has to have the "special snacks" at class parties and whatnot!
Ok, I'll enough about that. Do you have allergies? Because I do and because almost everyone I know also does, I kind of assume that's a "yes" for pretty much everyone. So maybe a better question would be this: Do you have unusual allergies? Ever had a random reaction like my thing with pizza? Leave me a comment and tell me about it!
I have found out in the last few months that I probably have some weird allergy to Splenda or other sugar substitute. I started eating a weight watchers yogurt every day and I broke out in this random rash on my arm. We thought I just had a reaction to something but it didn't go away. But when I stopped eating the yogurt because we couldn't' find it for a few weeks and it went away. I started eating it again, and the rash came back. So as an experiment I quit eating it. It went away, so I have been avoiding that. But, in the last few weeks I have started drinking 2 diet pepsi's per day, and the rash is back, so we kind of figure it's the artificial sweetener. I googled the rash and found out apparently a lot of people are allergic to splenda, so I'm guessing that is what this is because it looks just like it. It's more annoying than anything else. As for "normal" allergies, mine is cats. Just taking the dogs to the vet where a cat was made my sinuses go crazy for about 2 days.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I am with you. Allergies are not fun. The more we can be considerate and careful, though, about what people are exposed to, the better. Hence I try to remember and ask my guests if they have any allergies... because it is not fun to have to decline most of a meal because of the ingredients.
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