Spring allergies.

My spring allergies are always horrendous now, in the college town that I now live in…

Once you get outside of the town, it’s pretty rural, and everything in town has nice vegetation that’s almost southern and pretty much comes into bloom all at once.

I juice up every year with a nasal spray so the steroids have taken effect by the time that stuff really gets going, but even then I have problems, especially with post-nasal drip that makes me cough, which is a big problem at work when I’m waiting tables... If a cough suddenly comes upon me, I have to make sure to cough into my elbow, and I also have to make sure to tell customers that I’m not sick, there’s no way that I would come into work if I was sick, I just have bad seasonal allergies that are hard to medicate for, I tell them.

(There’s nothing grosser in a restaurant than an obviously sick employee.)

This year, too, my post-nasal drip developed into a small sinus infection, and for like 3 nights in a row my coughing woke me up at like 4/5/6am in the morning, where I’d have this heavy cough that wouldn’t stop until I finally got up out of bed and went into the bathroom and bent over the sink there and the change in position and sharp snorting would cause this simply gigantic dark hunk of congealed phlegm to tip over from my nasal cavity into the back of my throat, often catching there at the edge and causing me to choke, though, until finally I could snort sharply enough to get it into my mouth and spit it out into this hunk that just hit the bottom of the sink and sat there as like this big brown thing surrounded by a small pool of clear saliva, it was always so weighty, and massive.

Finally I got another strategy, too, where I would put a cough drop in my mouth when I laid down in bed to go to sleep, and I just let it rest in the side of my cheek…  Basically it would slowly dissolve all night long and keep my salivary glands going, and that would help enough with the post-nasal drip to mask it or to wash it away or whatever it does to help me so that I don’t wake up at night.

What a mess, and your personal state of unwellness simply does not match the vibe of the springtime.