Sneezing

Try sneezing really loudly.  Now try it again and again and again and again and again, very quickly with little or no break to breathe.  Not great , is it?  A bit panicky feeling? Well, that's what I've been doing all morning.

Cynthia's sneezing- therefore, it must be Spring.  Hurrah!

Hundreds of thousands of sneezes have passed these lips.  I remember the day this started about 16 years ago, exactly and to the moment. It was the day of cousin Emma's wedding. If my memory is clear, it was a sunny, warm day in late May and we were all dolled up for a family wedding.  Just before we left the house, just as I was putting the finishing touches on my make-up, I started sneezing.  Violent, rapid-fire sneezes, accompanied by itchy eyes, runny nose and soon, runny eye make-up that showed no sign of letting up.  We drove across London to the wedding as I sneezed in the car and arrived at the wedding with me in a crumpled, drippy, pathetic state.  There were at least five doctors at this wedding and did one of them have an antihistamine?  No, of course not. I sneezed through the ceremony, the reception and well into the night. And so it began...  Soon I even gained a reputation at work as 'that American woman who sneezes'.

I cannot  begin to count the amount of money I have spent on trying to cure, relieve or just lessen these allergies.  I have tried acupuncture, homeopathy, acupressure, naturopathy, kinesiology, Tibetan healing, changing my diet, cutting out various foods, reiki and ordinary allergy medications from my GP and other allergists. I have even used special nose drops that involved me hanging my head backwards and upside down off the edge of a bed. I am still sneezing.

A few years ago my father, who also developed what my doctor called, late onset allergies, reassured me greatly by telling me that I would eventually outgrow them.  He said he did, when he was 75.  So, not long to wait now, only 15 years.

I always have a few months of dormancy when I don't sneeze and completely forget the miseries and self-pity of allergic days.  Unfortunately the few months of sneeze-free time coincide with the few months of the year when I want to hibernate.  During the deepest winter I can put on all the eye make-up I like and not look like a raccoon.  Of course, I don't really want to go out or see people much, but the moment, the absolute instant,  the sun shines and the earth reawakens I develop what are referred to as 'allergic shiners'.  These are the dark circles under my eyes that accompany my life.  No matter how upbeat I feel or how rested I am, there they are - the big dark under-eye shadows.

Once I decided to visit the Laura Mercier make-up counter in a large department store for help. Somewhere I'd seen an article that said that this particularly expensive brand of make-up had the best under-eye concealer so far developed.  Great, I thought, that's for me.  I sat at the make-up counter and literally, in between my sneezes, the poor 'beauty adviser' tried cream upon cream, powder upon powder, going lighter, darker, pinker, yellower, until finally, she looked at me and said, " I don't think we can help you, why don't you try another company'.  Oh my god, I had to face it, there was no help out there.  I can look forward to going through life looking like a panda.

So I sneeze.  I look a bit damp and deflated, but it has its upside.  When travelling on any form of public transport I find that people give me just that bit more space.  I do have to also put up with lots of dirty looks and often people offer me tissues.  In countries all over the world I have been stunned to hear strangers a fair distance away wish me 'Gesundheit' or other local variations on this exhortation of health.  Recently in America, a bookstore employee was kind enough to print me a sticker that said, 'I do not have a cold, I sneeze from allergies'.  This helped at the airport where I think everyone thought I was coming down with plague and backed away in queues.

Today's allergy attack involved me going out and running some errands in a total histamine-laden fog, coming home and dosing up with old-fashioned sleep inducing antihistamines and sleeping for a few hours.  The idea was to sleep off this latest attack, wake up relieved, ready to do some work and then write a deep,meaningful blog entry. The reality is that I woke up sneezed a bunch of times, felt awful and just about managed to finish this entry.

There must be a better way.  And so the search begins,  the seasonal hunt for an allergy cure and the stockpiling of  remedies. I wish I had shares in the Kleenex company and of course, I wish you all 'Gesundheit'.