indessed roscivs

I have this persistent cough that refuses to go away. I’ve had it for a couple of months now and, while annoying, it’s not the end of the world, but I decided to get it checked out anyway “just in case”. The doctor thought it might be allergy-related, so she sent me to the allergy specialist to get pricked and prodded. What did I get? Forty-four tiny red dots, each an inch apart.

They shaved the underside of my arms and, with a gigantic collection of tiny plastic containers with a tiny scraper on each end, poked me forty-four times with various different allergens. I told them before the test that I figured I was allergic to cats and dust, but wanted to know if I was allergic to anything seasonal, perhaps something specific to the PNW. That might be the reason for getting a cough as the seasons were changing.

So they pricked me and sent me out to the lobby to wait twenty minutes to see what developed. And boy, did something develop! I pulled out my Nintendo DS and played Tetris, as I figured it would be the most distracting thing I could do, since they said “absolutely no scratching!” Even then I spent most of my time gritting my teeth and dropping blocks in the wrong places because the itching was so terrible! Here’s what it looked like:

(click for close-ups)

The left arm was 22 dots of PNW allergens, tree pollens of various sorts and so forth. No reactions at all. You can see all the tiny little dots quite clearly in the photo.

The right arm had some definite reactions. That top red spot is histamine, the “control” dot. Your body’s supposed to react to that one. Then there’s a dot under that that has no reaction, another “control” dot, this time with no allergens at all. Then under that is a huuuuge mark—the main bump was over an inch across, and the red surrounding the bump spread three or four inches in diameter. It was a monster. “I want to know what that one is!” I exlaimed to the specialist when they called me back in. “Dust mite,” they said. No big surprise that I was allergic to them—what surprised me, though, was how violent the reaction was! I’ve been living with dust allergies for years but they don’t really bother me (or so I thought) unless there’s a lot of dust being kicked up, e.g. from vacuuming or dusting.

The smaller spot below the dust mite spot is cats. I was suprised at how small that one was compared with dust mites, since I feel like I have a much more severe reaction to cats—but I guess I’m just more accustomed to the dust mite reactions since I have them all the time. And finally, the spot at the bottom is one type of dust itself (different from dust mites). There’s another similar spot just below it that didn’t make it into the picture, which is yet a third dust-related particle. So, I’m allergic to cats, and really allergic to pretty much everything dust-related.

So the specialist gave me a bunch of information about special bed covers and HEPA filters and vacuum cleaners and told me about getting rid of down comforters and washing the sheets every week in hot water and all the other things that you’re supposed to do to stay dust mite free. Well, that was all well and good, but I’ve been managing my dust allergies pretty well for the past twenty-some-odd years, thank you very much (usually with a pocket full of kleenex). But where did this sudden cough come from?

Still no idea. The specialist thinks (of course) that minimizing the allergens I’m exposed to will help get rid of the cough, but prescribed me a few things to try if things didn’t get better. I think I may try taking some antihistamines to see if they make any difference (my guess is they’ll reduce my sneezing habits but do nothing for the cough). But I don’t think I’ll make another visit to the doctor unless it gets worse.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 9:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.