Wearing my sunglasses indoors, struggling to tear into some new drugs, my daughter looks alarmed. "Mum, what are you doing? You look like a crackhead." I know I look stupid; I feel even more stupid. Hay fever does that.
Apart from turning your body into a snot factory, you feel perpetually fogged up; not really there at all. It's a miserable thing. Far from wanting to skip around in your newest summer gear, gaily enjoying the weather with a picnic you have spent days preparing, hay fever means you should stay indoors. And stick Vaseline up your nose.
Right now it's bad, and predicted to get worse. We are in the midst of a "particularly severe pollen season [which] could cause widespread suffering into the middle of next month" . The NHS will spend at least £50m on medications and Allergy UK says we will spend up to £900m on allergy-related illnesses. I feel I can account for most of that: eye drops, nasal sprays, various pills that may make you incapable of driving or operating heavy machinery – skills that I already possess!
Various antihistamines will make you dopey or weirdly speedy and may take the edge off, but there is no cure for hay fever. There is little comfort for the afflicted; we suffer in silence except for public sneezing attacks and weeping in the park. Mustn't grumble, though, because it won't kill us … unless we are prone to severe asthma. Enjoy the weather, just don't breathe, and then you won't inhale all the bad pollen.
For years I thought allergies were for oversensitive wusses, until I went to the doctors a few year ago with what I thought must be tonsillitis only to find I was allergic to trees.
Hay fever usually accounts for between 2% and 3% of GP visits, but it is more at the moment – it is hitting older people and is particularly miserable for teens and those in their 20s during exam time.
As there is no cure the alternative market spies a cash-cow and offers a range of extremely expensive waters or pills in tiny bottles. This is called homeopathy and the only thing I will say in its defence is that, though fundamentally useless, no one has ever been as interested in me whingeing on as the ruddy-faced women who diagnosed my hay fever not as a reaction to pollen or even pollution, but as repressed grief about my mother's death. This cheap trick did actually take my mind off the mucous for a while, but of course was way more costly than any number of nasal sprays.
It's really not cool to moan about hay fever when all around you people are suffering in far worse ways, but then "irritability" is a symptom. My fellow sufferers will have read the routine lists on how to prepare for the inevitable onslaught of feeling submerged and completely rubbish. But I rather like the person who underneath one of said lists tweeted: "I'M GOING TO DIE, THAT'S HOW I'M GOING TO PREPARE #hayfeversusceptible #doomed #achoo."
Bless you. I don't think you are over reacting at all.
