Dear Allergies, You Suck.

Allergies totally suck. All kinds of allergies.  Hay fever, food allergies, medicine allergies: all of it.  Totally sucks.  Not in the awesome way like one of those hipster Dyson vacuums that I can't afford.  They suck the suckiness of your car breaking down, the suckiness of stomach viruses, and the suckiness of New Twitter, which sucks almost as much as New Coke.

Our family has a massive history of allergies.  My husband, the Absent-Minded Professor, has seasonal allergies and some crazy plant allergies.  He's severely allergic to morning glory flowers; they're like poison ivy to him.  Or maybe more like kryptonite, since he's normally so awesome.  Once, after a particularly violent battle with a morning glory vine, he had to do two separate courses of oral steroids to even be presentable enough for work.  The fact that he did not break the record for most home runs in a single season that summer still baffles and disappoints us greatly.

I have some weird food allergies.  I am allergic to kiwi and papaya, for example.  I didn't realize I was allergic to them until I was an adult, because apparently I'm a moron.  I thought everyone felt like they had just eaten prickly thorns after eating kiwi.  I couldn't figure out why anyone liked papaya because it tastes exactly like burning poison.  This kind of allergic reaction is called Oral Itch Syndrome, which isn't quite as disgusting as it sounds.  I'm also severely allergic to both wool and tea, which means I will never grow up to be an English grandmother.  Which sucks, because English grandmothers are awesome and my stepmum is proof of that.

Do you see the pattern here?  Allergies.  And suckiness.

Cookie and the Pork Lo Maniac were born with extensive and severe food allergies that were not fully diagnosed until they were almost two years old.  Some allergies were easy to figure out on our own (one serving of corn = bleeding diaper rash for eight months); and some were not (is that upset stomach from the reflux or the milk?).  Because of the history of food allergies in our family, we waited until the girls were a year old before giving them any wheat.  Both of them immediately developed head-to-toe rashes.  Our (first) allergist performed a skin-prick test and blithely pronounced them "negative" to wheat.

Um, except they got a rash when they ate it.

At the urging of our pediatric gastroenterologist, we switched to a new allergist, this one located smack dab in the heart of my beloved Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.  It turns out that my kids are in the tiny percentage of allergic people who have a T-cell reaction, not an IgE reaction.  That's medical talk for my kids are freaks.  Who, obviously, come from a long line of freaks.

We are, literally, the kind of freaks that medical professionals write papers about.

Now, I know that people like to talk about the rise in allergies of late, and say that it's caused by toxic crap in the environment, or because women eat peanut butter when they're pregnant or because women don't eat peanut butter when they're pregnant.  I've heard that allergies are caused by having pets and allergies are caused by not having pets.

However, I know for sure that toxic crap is not what caused the allergies in our case.  Our allergies are hereditary.  Our allergies are so hereditary that I vividly remember the glorious day back in the 1980s when Benadryl went over-the-counter.  We celebrated with dairy-free cupcakes.

So the debate on what causes allergies is both completely academic and completely uninteresting to me.  Sorry.  Please have that debate elsewhere because I am busy measuring out a $60 Allegra prescription while looking for the hydrocortisone.   The only debate I'm interested in right now is whether my son's allergic reaction to cherry Chapstick yesterday was to the color, the scent, or both.

Let's all just agree that I have some really crappy genetics, and move on.

But, that brings up the cherry Chapstick.  We found out the hard way yesterday that Little Dude is allergic to cherry Chapstick.  His bottom lip was chapped and swollen because he has a nervous habit of sucking on it when he's stressed.  And the day before a kid fell on him at school, which for a kid with Asperger is the equivalent of getting hit in the head with a big bucket of sensory trauma.  So he was stressed.  And therefore his bottom lip was all sore and chappy.

Now it is sore and chappy and puffy and burned.

I hate the allergies. It's one thing when you're anticipating a reaction, like during a food challenge.  Then, you've got the Benadryl, the hydrocortisone, and probably an Epi-Pen at the ready.  But when you apply some Chapstick to your child, and then hear his panicked scream, slow at first and then rising, well, it catches you off guard.

Every time one of my children has an allergic reaction, I am thankful that they are not anaphylactic.  Even in our worst-case scenarios, my kids are going to keep breathing.  For being spared that kind of allergy, I am grateful, and my heart goes out to the parents that deal with that fear on a daily basis.  I am also grateful that my daughters have all outgrown all of their food allergies, leaving only a handful of medicine allergies and some wicked environmental allergies to deal with. Little Dude has gone from the most extremely limited diet to needing to only exclude a few foods, like eggs.

I am grateful for all that.  But I just want to go on the record: allergies suck.