Allergies

April 8, 2024

 

I didn’t google long term effects of exposure to allergens until I had to sit down after the first hour of karate on Sunday morning and I couldn’t finish the class. That hadn’t happened to me ever in the 20 odd years of doing karate. No matter my physical condition I always finished the training. 

I also didn’t realise how angry I was until that happened. 

This post is more for people who suffer from allergies. Others may not get it. I see people around me, those who care deeply about me, also haven’t understood the impact of allergies on my life, and maybe that has made me marginalize this within myself. 

It began on Friday. My body had begun feeling better from the flu on Thursday. My mind had begun to feel hopeful that I would recover soon too, and when someone I met recently wrote saying they had tested positive for covid I wondered if what I had been experiencing was covid. I hadn’t tested because, really, how long does one live in the grip of testing for covid. But I heard many had been suffering from a flu like mine and I assumed that was that. But if it had been covid then it explained the prolonged fatigue, and I felt hopeful of a full recovery.

It was that Friday evening when my spouse began sorting the laundry into neat piles on the dining table that I smelt that overwhelming intense smell. I had been complaining about it, saying that the kitchen smelt weird, for a few days. Since he is not challenged by smell allergies he had said, probably the new fabric softener I bought. 

I should have insisted he get rid of the box of softener sheets. I should have thrown it out myself, but I didn’t, and I truly hate myself for it.

But even that evening I wrinkled my nose and said, uuughh that smell is so strong and left it so. Later I pulled on a freshly laundered tank and shorts pair to sleep in and immediately realized I couldn’t wear them. But even then, I believed that the smells would dissipate, that all I would have to do is wash out again the things that had been in the dryer with that softener.

Assaulted by that smell I didn’t sleep well that night and on Saturday afternoon after I returned from karate and found I couldn’t sleep again, I began to deeply experience the helplessness. With every in-breath all I smelt what that smell. Weirdly it was the same smell that had assaulted me in Bombay when the linen I was using had been dry-cleaned using a similar softener. The curtains in the library had also been dry-cleaned with the same softener and after three months of them hanging through sunny days the smell still lingered in the library. It didn’t for my sister or my mother or my spouse but I felt suffocated and trapped by my linen and the curtains in my second favourite sitting area in my Bombay home. It felt horrid and I had to use antihistamines to deal with it. I functioned at lowered capacity as anyone who has had to use antihistamines long term knows, but it all had an end-date. I knew that when I left Bombay, I would be free and be normal again. 

Now it was in my home. My safe, sacred, haven. And I began to feel a sense of doom. A feeling that I would never escape. It blocked my nostrils, inflamed the tissues within my ears, constricted my throat, compressed my head, burned my lungs. I felt dizzy. I felt my soul permanently damaged. I am not exaggerating; those are actually the things I felt. To cope I walked up and down the living room and short corridor, and muttered aloud and wrote in my journal. 

And today, Tuesday, I still smell that smell with every inbreath. My brain feels pummeled into a mashed banana state. I feel confused and helpless and angry. 

As I said the anger ballooned on Sunday. It encompassed everything, every part of me. Anger at myself – for not throwing that box out, but equally at my spouse for not paying attention, for being indifferent to my challenged nose. 

Repeated allergen exposure weakens the immune system and makes one susceptible to fungus and bacteria in the nose, throat, lungs, and ears. It makes one feel light-headed, depressed, and fatigued. One even might feel a sense of doom, I read.

Someone who suffers from severe allergies will know what I am talking about. 

Anger peaked and spilled over and over. It was a deadly Sunday. I felt like an uncontrolled animal of some sort. 

Monday, I tried to control the anger, and at moments I could but every inbreath I was still saying please any other smell, please, please, please. I felt quite hysterical. But in some moments I became aware of how I had been assaulted by smells since November — the boxes while packing and unpacking, then in my mum’s home, then when I went for cat-sitting in my daughter’s home too there was an odour from an air freshener that my nose didn't like, and finally this here, where there is no end-date. The curtains exposed to air and sunlight still smelt three months later. When would these smells leave this space? 

Of course I considered going to stay in a hotel for a while but how long would that while be?

In the moments when panic was low, I began seeing this as a process symptom, a message that I seemed unable to hear and so the messenger made it stronger, more deadly each time. 

I know I need to fully process this body symptom, inhabit the symptom maker to understand its purpose but for now all I can do is feel like the victim. Feel like someone strong is holding a slightly porous cloth soaked in a malodorous toxin over my nose and mouth and forcing me to breathe through it. Death would come if the cloth was not porous, but this porosity keeps me alive yet makes me experience the suffocation at each in-breath, and have me begging for death. The toxin enters my lungs and my blood and flows into every organ in my body. I have trouble sleeping, thinking, eating, or even drinking water. I can’t exercise. I manage to distract myself with TV —watched the black and white, The Talented Mr Ripley — but since it is in every part of my body and home I feel hopeless and wonder if I should even try bother doing anything. 

Through journaling I also see this process is pointing me to relationship issues – intra and inter, with the closest, and slightly further away. There is a ton going on and unless I learn to hear the messages, I fear that I will be further compromised. It is urgent I listen even if I can’t because all my brain is able to do is say over and over, this will never go, this will never go, I am doomed, I am doomed. 

I am aware of a small feeling of something besides doom today. I feel like perhaps writing has become a way of life, like karate had become. It is something I am disciplined enough to do under the most adverse conditions. Something that doesn’t get bogged down with physical, emotional, or spiritual oppressions. I can do it when incapacitated, like I could do karate weeks after fairly major surgeries and through flus, and muscle strains. I did write my Tuesday blog even though body and mind feel on fire. 

Not sure what that means but that thought feels nice.