Health
The Agony and the Allergy
People with allergies don’t have to live in a glass bubble. They just wish they could.
(Page 2 of 3)
For many years I have taken prescription antihistamines to counteract sneezes, runny nose, itching, and tearing. The doctor said I should continue to use them when needed, and he wrote out a prescription for an antihistamine that includes a decongestant for stuffiness. I told him that as much as the antihistamines helped, I was nervous about taking them. The Physician’s Desk Reference lists the following potential “adverse reactions” to the antihistamine I had used most frequently: drowsiness, confusion, restlessness, nausea, vomiting, drug rash, vertigo, palpitation, anorexia, dizziness, dysuria due to vesical sphincter spasm, headache, insomnia, anxiety, tension, weakness, tachycardia, angina, sweating, blood pressure elevation, mydriasis, gastric distress, abdominal cramps, central nervous system stimulation, and circulatory collapse. All of the prescription and over-the-counter antihistamines I have tried can cause similar problems. And the Physician’s Desk Reference warns that an overdose of some of the popular antihistamines may cause convulsions and death, particularly in infants and children.
Despite these dire warnings, I have never experienced anything more uncomfortable than a little dehydration after a double dose of antihistamines. But I have heard others complain of becoming drowsy or strung out or, as my filmmaker friend says, woolly-headed from antihistamines.
The doctor said that he takes a patient’s medical history into account before prescribing antihistamines. It is sometimes unwise to prescribe decongestants for patients with high blood pressure. He said he asks all patients to report adverse reactions so that he can change medication when necessary. What I was really concerned about was the possibility that twenty years from now I might discover I had kidney trouble or circulatory problems caused by antihistamines. Not to worry, the doctor insisted. Doctors have twenty to thirty years of history on antihistamines and they are among the safest medicines one can take. To date, there have been no reports of liver or kidney toxicity or any other form of bodily damage caused by extended use of antihistamines. But, the doctor emphasized, antihistamines merely suppress symptoms, just like aspirin suppresses the pain of a headache; they don’t cure allergies. The goal is to get a patient’s allergies under control so that he no longer needs antihistamines for temporary relief.
My chronic symptoms, he explained, were primarily caused by allergens in my home environment, the three biggest culprits being cat dander, house dust, and feathers. Staying home all day, I was constantly breathing air that was chock-full of things that made me sick. I was fortunate, he said, because with a little effort I could clean up my environment. “Avoidance measures are the soundest method of treatment,” he said. “If I had only one function as an allergist, the most important thing I could do is convince my patients to get their animals out of the house. Cats are the worst of all because of their fine dander—not just hair but skin cells and protein from saliva. They’re the very worst.”
The doctor said he would not even try to immunize me against cat dander because the treatment was rarely successful. It would be virtually impossible to boost the doses high enough to allow me comfortably to keep a cat in the house. Before I left the office he extracted a solemn promise that I would banish poor Kitty Lou that very day. I had visions of him devoting his professional career to earnest counseling on the importance of making Fido an outdoor dog and donating the hamsters to the pound.
I was given an instruction sheet on how to reduce the dust and particle content of my house. Inspired by hopes of a headache-free future, I immediately bought plastic covers for my mattress, box springs, and bed pillows. At home I bent to serious cleaning of the bedroom, where, the instruction sheet point out, you spend more time than in any other room. I boxed the moth-eaten goat-hair rug for delivery to Goodwill and took the blankets and bedspread to the Laundromat (I now wash the blanket and spread once a month). My instructions said that cotton and other natural materials should be considered old after a year. The older they get the more particles they contribute to household dust. A six-room house in a metropolitan area generates about forty pounds of dust a year. This is not yard dirt or mud off your shoes but fine particles from animals, stuffed furniture, carpets, carpet padding, curtains, clothing, even decomposed insects. I am supposed to damp mop the bedroom floor a couple of times a week and dust thoroughly every day.
I mopped and dusted feverishly for a week. My environment was definitely getting cleaner. The doctor said it would take a couple of months to get the full benefit of removing the cat, but after only two weeks my ears stopped itching and ringing. The sound in my head, however, was replaced by the pathetic wails of Kitty Lou, clinging to the screen door.
I was also reading allergy books from the library. Some of them made my clean-up efforts seem absolutely slovenly—for example, these instructions from one of the better reference books, The Complete Allergy Guide, by Dr. Howard G. Rapaport and Shirley Motter Linde (Simon and Schuster, 1970):
“Frequent heavy cleaning of the hayfever patient’s room is essential . . . Preparatory to cleaning, as much as possible of the furniture, carpets, curtains, and drapes should be taken from the room or moved to the center and all of the closets should be emptied. The closet should contain only necessary things in current use and should be as dust-free as the room. Seal off the registers and furnace pipes if the room is warm enough without them. . . Wash down the walls and ceilings, the woodwork, the floors, the radiators or registers, the closets, the furniture. Be sure to wash off things like the backs and corners of the furniture and tops of doors, window frames, sills, moldings, lights, and closet shelves. [And then my favorite line] The patient should always be out of the room or out of the house when it is being cleaned.”
Oh sure.
Since “the patient” has to do most of the cleaning in my household, I appreciated the suggestion of wearing a surgical gauze mask for heavy housecleaning. It looks pretty peculiar, but it does help.
Another book recommended purchasing a vacuum cleaner that filters dust into water rather than into a disposable bag. Bag cleaners invariably recirculate some of the house dust with the exhaust, but particles trapped in water can’t escape. Unfortuantely, the only water filter vacuum I could find was a Rainbow, which at over $300 was too expensive for my budget.
Any air filtration system, from an air conditioner on up, is beneficial to the allergic person. As an experiment, I rented for a month an Enviracaire laminar air purifier, which is advertised as an aid to allergy sufferers. The filter, which rests on a stand, is bigger, but lighter, than a portable TV and sounds like a large fan. The company brochure claims that within two hours it cleans the air in a normal-size bedroom. I paid $40 to rent the unit for the month. (The rental agency was selling them for $350, which seemed steep since once can buy an equally efficient electronic filter for a central heating and cooling system for between $300 and $600. That’s the cost of putting a filter in a new home unit, rather than an old one. Not all old central air systems can be retooled to use an electronic filter, and it is more costly to make the changes in an old system.)
I set up the Enviracaire unit at the foot of my bed in hopes that while I was sleeping I would clear my head and unclog my sinuses. The filtered air smelled clean and pure, all right, but my sinuses were still stuffed most mornings. The doctor explained that while breathing pure air for eight hours a day is an improvement over breathing pollen-filled air, eight hours is not sufficient time to cleanse the system of allergens. He pointed out that hayfever sufferers often continue to sneeze for weeks after the season has passed.
My enthusiasm for these various experiments with my environment soon ebbed. There came a time fairly early on when I had done as much cleaning and rearranging as I was willing to do. I suppose that for optimism lean breathing I should set up residence in a hospital or a motel. I have a friend with bad allergies who works in a museum and love sit. He says, “Anyplace an old oil painting can survive, I can survive—dust free, humidity controlled, air-conditioned, thoroughly vacuumed. I find that kind of terrifying in a way—to discover that it takes so much to make me comfortable. I have visions of becoming an old man living in a plastic bag.”
Yes, there’s the rub. Thirty-five million American allergy sufferers from the great grassy plains to the polluted cities are all trying to strike some practical balance between personal comfort and contact with the outside world. I have a friend who is dramatically allergic to cats and yet sleeps with two fat Siamese because she thinks the emotional trauma of removing her beloved pets would be worse than her chronically drippy nose.
My Library
