I’ve got a petal to pick with seasonal allergies

Felicity Fulton, Staff Writer

It’s spring time. The weather is getting nicer and the windy days are perfect for things like flying kites. I can’t fly kites though, since I’m a coughing, sniffly mess every time I step a toe outside. What can go fly a kite, however, are seasonal allergies.

If seasonal allergies are just that (seasonal) then why do I have to suffer for three out of four of them? Shouldn’t they only be around for one of them? The only time I’m not affected by this torture is winter. Because everything is dead. I can’t be the only one out there who is like this, can I?

I personally suffer from a few kinds of allergies: pollen, cottonwood, and hayfever. So everytime the grass is cut or I walk under one of the really pretty cherry blossom trees outside of Walker Hall, my sinuses and skin attack me. Even if I just touch a leaf of a flower, I suddenly feel like I have chicken pox. What did I do to nature to have it hate me so?

My allergies have been especially bad since coming to campus. I don’t know if it’s the area or just a change of location, but it’s bad. Last spring, I had the worst allergy attack that I’ve ever had. I had to convince everyone I talked to that week that I didn’t have COVID. 

Seasonal allergies affect as many as 60 million people a year in the US, according to the CDC.

Looking at that fact, statistically at least one of you has to relate to me. I like flowers. I think they’re pretty. Though because of my allergies (and the fact that I kill any plant I own but that’s besides the point) I can’t enjoy them. 

I’m supposed to be going to the Wooden Shoe Tulip Festival here in a few weeks with friends, and even though I look forward to going, I know I’m just going to suffer the whole time. The only flower that doesn’t seem to irritate me is lavender, for some reason.

I want to go hiking, I want to have picnics, I want to study outside in the six-pack when it’s nice, yet no matter how much I try to enjoy what I’m doing or my company, all my thoughts go straight to the fact that I’m so itchy it hurts. Even while writing this, I have my dorm room window open to get some fresh air in the room, and I’m so freaking itchy. 

It would be funny if it wasn’t so painful.

Sometimes I wish that I was allergic to more normal things. I have no food allergies, and I only have a sensitivity to most perfumes. Instead, I’m allergic to the outdoors. They say that getting out is good for your mental health, but if I’m in agony every time I step outside, I don’t know if I believe it.

I’m grateful for one thing on this campus, though, and it’s that at least my car doesn’t get coated in a thick layer of pollen every spring like back in high school. It was so thick that if you drew in it, the pollen would be three dimensional. So gross. So itchy.

So Spring, please leave the flowers and plants the way they are, but tell your friend pollen to go fly a kite. Thanks. 

 

Signed,

A Plant Lover/Allergy Hater