Keep walking, I'm breathing

[sovay]

I did not get sheep-dipped in Benadryl, but I am full of antihistamines and eating a pumpernickel bagel with chopped liver and a coconut-milk milkshake.

I have not become allergic to my cats. My long-time allergies to dust mites have worsened to the point where the mitigation strategies in which I already engage are not cutting it, so I have some further suggestions, an alteration to my medications, and we go from here. I also seem to have become allergic to pigweed, which I had never even heard of until I looked it up, at which point it turned out to be amaranth which I have both eaten and admired as an ornamental plant. I am decorated with surgical marker and punctures. I had been scratch-tested before, but never intradermally injected.

The fog at dawn was an astonishing suffusion of gold, glinting like rainbows around the Prudential. Afterward I took a couple of pictures from MGH and the Longfellow Bridge. I believe my plans for the afternoon involve a nap.

Comments

[kore]

OMFG do I even want to know how you know you are allergic to cockroaches? That sounds like a horror movie!

Aha, looking at a couple of lab test pricing pages (like this one https://www.walkinlab.com/products/view/pigweed-rough-common-allergy-ige-blood-test), it looks like that may indeed be "Pigweed, rough (common)," which is Amaranthus retroflexus, a small plant from the Amaranth family, also called "redroot amaranthus." It looks kind of tall, very bristly, pale green. "However, there are many species of amaranth, and they cross-react allergenically," another site helpfully notes. "The genus also contains many weedy plants known as pigweed, especially rough pigweed (A. retroflexus), prostrate pigweed (A. graecizans), and white pigweed (A. albus)."

But it sounds like A. retroflexus might be the culprit? (Apologies if this is not helpful!)

[sovay]

OMFG do I even want to know how you know you are allergic to cockroaches? That sounds like a horror movie!

It came up in the test! I'd had no idea until then! It was about equivalent to the mite allergens, intriguingly, i.e. the welts came up like thunder out of China 'cross the bay. I can't tell if it's a new development or if I was just never exposed to the necessary threshold of allergen, because I remember petting a hissing cockroach at the Harvard science festival in 2018 and nothing bad happened.

But it sounds like A. retroflexus might be the culprit? (Apologies if this is not helpful!)

It's not unhelpful! It's just reinforcing my belief that when you are diagnosed with a new allergy, you should definitely get some binomial nomenclature with it.

[kore]

because I remember petting a hissing cockroach at the Harvard science festival in 2018 and nothing bad happened

//halfway up the curtains

I grew up in Santa Fe! We didn't have cockroaches!....centipedes yes, cockroaches no.

[minoanmiss]

Yay for doing some research! I was still at the stage of waving my arms and saying "but not providing scientific names is just UNSCIENTIFIC wtf"

[sovay]

"but not providing scientific names is just UNSCIENTIFIC wtf"

It is! I'm still going to call them!

[minoanmiss]

Sends you energy for the call