I am now entering my third continuous month of sinus allergies. This weekend I pretty much lost the ability to breathe through my nose. I sat in the sauna at the gym and it felt awesome. It’s hard not to blame the pollution: this is easily the most polluted place I’ve ever lived. But who knows what kind of exotic stuff is blooming here? I’ve been steadily upping my meds, yesterday I was taking twice or three times the recommended dosage of antihistimines, etc., but I have acquired such a tolerance to them that they have become essentially pointless. Heavy coffee drinkers know what this is like: when you have a constant level of caffeine in your system, it no longer keeps you awake. So I quit the meds cold turkey this morning and my head feels like the I-5/Banfield interchange at 5:30 in the afternoon.
I learned at a young age that I can’t trust my body. Actually I probably learned this when I was born, with club feet, a heart murmur and a lazy eye. Allergies, nearsightedness, and asthma came later. I was a skinny, pale kid with gigantic bug glasses, kind of like Peter Billingsley in Christmas Story. I was the kid who couldn’t throw or catch and always fell off skateboards. I hated being that kid.
When I was 24 I went to an eye doctor for my first set of contact lenses. The optician had me put on these polarized glasses for a depth perception test. It was in the form of a ten-page flipbook: each page had a circle cut into four quadrants. With the polarized lenses one of the quadrants was supposed to jump out. The effect was increasingly less pronounced: so page 10 was, I dunno 10 times harder to perceive than page 1. I made it to page 2. The optician said, “I have never seen someone with two good eyes that did as poorly on this test as you did.” I said, “this explains why I can’t catch a baseball.” Later, the optometrist fit me for my new contacts and I almost cried. He said, “I always like fitting someone for their first contact lenses.” I held my hands out beside my ears (in my peripheral vision) and said, “I had no idea people could see out here.”
On the other hand, I have an iron stomach and good teeth. For all the falling down I’ve done in my life, the only bone I’ve ever broken is in my right pinky toe. I can suffer heat and cold, in fact I kind of like heat and cold so it’s kind of a stretch to call it “suffering”. I like to sleep on the bare wood floor and have never met a food I couldn’t enjoy eating. I can think of no better way to spend a warm Saturday than to ride a bicycle a hundred miles, preferably over some hills. Unless you’re moving—helping a friend move a refrigerator is almost as much fun as the bike ride. I like to remind myself that, poorly engineered though it is, my body is wiry and tough and good for a lot of abuse.
I always hated complaining about my health. Or more accurately, I hate being fussed over. I’d rather suffer than draw attention to my discomfort. The worst is when I’m in a house with cats. Cat owners who know me, know that my cat allergy has sent me to the emergency room (twice). So they fuss and fuss: they clean really thoroughly, lock the cat in another room, open windows, run air purifiers. This bugs me because I hate the attention (see re: Peter Billingsley, above) but also because it doesn’t do any good. The only thing that makes an allergy better is to get away from the allergen.
This is a hard lesson for Jenny, with her good eyesight and strong lumbar vertebrae and resilient immune system. In her entire life, if she has ever been sick, well there was something she could do to make it better. Get a pill from the doctor or somesuch. She always wonders, what can we do? The sad answer is: nothing. We ignore it. There are some problems that have no solutions, so you have to learn to cope with them.
This is probably the most I’ve thought about my own body since...gee, ever.
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