Allergies Suck!

[WinterRosie]

We are allergic to something. No one (in the immunology departments) can figure out what it is, and blood tests aren't helping. We've lost pints of blood to testing. We've eaten various things, and been scratched a multitude of times. Because we know very little about allergy systems we'll go with what the doctors said, which is that there are two major types of reactions (or umbrellas) - reacts to benadryl-type medication, or not. Swells up and is itchy, or not. Can't remember the other marker.

Anyway, we get our eyes swelling shut, or our lips swell up to 5x the right size, or our cheeks swell up and we just look freakish. The best guess is that it's hives, but they don't know for sure. They think that it's a reaction to anti-inflammatories (Asprin/Advil/Aleve, etc). Which could be true. The one time that we had Asprin we sure did swell up! We swell up lots of times without taking them, though.

The end result is that now we can't have them. The only medication that we take is Tylenol (which is useless, been tolerant of that for years) and codeine (which leads to brain fogs, and is a ... problem... when ... heroin, yeah - you can go to that board for details on that).

So, now we're in the wonderful world of life without pain relief (since weed, a perfectly fine solution and easily accessible in this country, leads to anxiety and potential worse MI problems)! This is a hardship. And now when we hurt what are the options? Going to bed? Thankfully we can get Tylenol+codeine non-prescription here... (and Asprin+codeine for that matter. Fat lot of good it does us, though!)

[saveyoursanity]

Oh man, WinterRosie, I'm so sorry.

I just had an allergic reaction today to the bandage adhesive near my surgery site and it was driving me I N S A N E. I thought I was going to rip the new bandage off and just scratch scratch scratch myself bloody.

[justme04]

aw man, i'm really sorry to hear about all of your allergy problems.

i really hope they figure out what is causing it..