If you’ve tried allergy medication and eliminating allergens as much as possible from your life but continue suffer with allergies, you may want to consider immunotherapy.

Understanding Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy is a process of receiving injections with your particular allergen(s) so that your body will produce antibodies to ward of your reaction to them. The doctor will start with a small dose and increase it until you start to show a reaction. This can mean that you receive two injections a week for a month. Once at the proper dosage, you may have to return for an injection weekly for a certain amount of months determined by your doctor.

The Benefits of This Allergy Relief

Immunotherapy can save you a lot of grief and money because once you have built up the antibodies; you will no longer have a reaction to your allergens.  You’ll finally find relief from the allergies you suffered with for years. However, for some people, a booster injection is required a few years later.

The Cost of Immunotherapy

Unfortunately, since immunotherapy isn’t considered pharmaceuticals, many insurance companies will not cover the cost. To pay out of pocket, you are looking at about $1,000 for the first year and the second year in which you only get a couple injections a month may run you about $350. If you are not able to afford immunotherapy, shop around because doctors vary in pricing. Also, you can contact your state’s allergy society for information on low or no-cost immunotherapy in your area.

Photo: Sarah G

Let’s talk for a bit about food allergies. One of the most common and well known, today anyway, is the gluten allergy. I actually had no idea such a thing existed until several years ago when one of my co-workers discovered by accident that she was in fact allergic to gluten and that consuming gluten was what had been ruining her health for the past several years with ever increasing intensity. Back when she first found out, she had a hard time coping with the loss of so many food staples.

The thing that makes me vicariously happy for her now, is that I’m seeing an increase in the amount of gluten free products on the grocery shelves. While I have no need for them personally I know for a fact that they make her happy. I mean who doesn’t want to be able to eat a cookie or some bread every once in awhile. Seriously, most of my favorite foods have gluten in them and I’d probably cry for a really long time if that was one of my allergies.

Do you have any favorite gluten free products? Please share so I can point her in the yummy direction!

Photo Credit Foooooey

I swear you’d think I was the biggest crybaby in the entire world the way people sometimes look at me. As a matter of fact I’m not the kind of bird that cries at all around other people. But to look at my eyes sometimes you’d never know that. I use to get sooo tired of people looking at me that way and asking me if I was ok. I’d say yeah, just allergies. Then they’d sort of, how to put it…look like they wanted to pat me on the back and then just nod. Like I was lying. Like they thought someone had died, or my husband beat me or I was emotionally unstable.

Seriously, people. It’s just allergies. Yes, they are a pain to live with but when someone tells you that their red rimmed watery eyes are not a big deal could you at least give them the benefit of the doubt and not look at them (ME!) like their mental health was in question? It’s bad enough to feel like I do when my allergies are in overdrive without having to feel like a two year old. Rant over.

Do your allergies cause you to have red watery eyes and want to cry (haha) because of the way people treat you?

Photo Credit: Care SMC

My children have severe food allergies to peanuts, although I am not allergic. Allergy testing is vital for keeping kids healthy and working with your doctor to have a game plan. Other parents should have their children tested for food allergies and other serious allergies. Hopefully someday, a cure for all allergies will be found! I hope!

In the meantime, check out this article about undiagnosed allergies: http://www.diagnosingallergies.com/articles/undiagnosed-allergies/index.php

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/macinate/2105923713/

As I mentioned in a previous post, when my allergies are flaring I have a lot of trouble sleeping. How is this for irony…when I can’t sleep my allergy symptoms get worse. So let’s say I’m having a bout of insomnia (yeah, I suffer from that sometimes too…don’t you want to be me?) Or heck, not even insomnia let’s just say I was up late working on a project or the baby was up all night several nights in a row. The point is when I don’t get adequate sleep it is like my allergy medication doesn’t work….at all. I swear it’s like I forget to take it (no, I don’t actually forget).

That got me wondering if there is some correlation between sleep deprivation and the way histamine works in your body, so I asked my allergist. He told me that at the time, this was a few years ago, that there had been no studies that conclusively proved this but that he’d heard from a number of patients the same thing. The fact that there was some anecdotal evidence made me feel much better. I guess because crazy isn’t so bad if you aren’t alone, ya know? Anyway, a few weeks ago I saw that a study had been done and there is in fact a difference in the way your body handles allergens if you are running on fumes. That isn’t the way they put it, of course, but that was the meaning.

The moral of this story, for me anyway, is do everything you can to get enough sleep at night! Has anyone else noticed a worsening of their allergy symptoms when they are exhausted?

Photo Credit: Jennie Faber

When I’m having a really bad allergy flare up, there is something that is more frustrating than my sneezing and sniffling and increased Kleenex purchases. I am able to get almost no sleep. People who have had a really bad head cold may understand, although there symptoms are temporary. When my allergies are really acting up I can’t breathe at night well enough to sleep through the night.

I think this allergy symptom is not discussed enough. I mean, people can see I’m suffering when I’m sneezing my head off or when I’m coughing like a lifetime smoker. What they can’t see is the hours of sleep I didn’t get the previous night. Less sleep (for me anyway) means everything the next day is more difficult. I have a harder time concentrating, being polite, heck being civilized and people have no idea why my evil twin has emerged.

What makes it so difficult to sleep? My typical allergy symptoms, of course. I’ll lay down and be so stuffy I can’t breathe through my nose. Or my nose will be so drippy that I’m like a waterfall…do you know how hard it is to sleep if you are constantly dripping?! Or when you roll on one side and your are drippy but the other side is stuff. I could go on and on.

So, someone tell me. Why isn’t a lack of sleep listed at the top of every list of symptoms of seasonal allergies list??

Photo Credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Hypoallergenic dogs are great choices for people allergic to pet dander. Just because you are allergic to dogs doesn’t mean you can’t have a dog. I have a hypoallergenic Bichon Frisé and no asthma symptoms, although I am allergic to most other dogs and all cats.

You can find more information on pet dander in this article.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjarda/2339516878/

I have had one heck of a week. My son started getting sick Friday. Little bit of a runny nose, nothing too horrible. By Friday night he had a full blown fever. When he woke up at 4:30 a.m. his fever was close to 102, he was all kinds of snotty, and totally hysterical (a sick 17 month old gets scared). Things went downhill from there, no reason to scar you with the horror story. I’ll just say…it was bad. Within 48 hours hubby was sick and within 72 hours I was sick as well. Hubby and baby both had noses that could have been Olympic runners. Contenders for the gold even. Me? Not so much.

Sure I had the stuffyness, sore throat, exhaustion, headache, and even a little fever. But nary a drip. Want to know my theory as to why I didn’t suffer as much as my two boys? I’m not a doctor or anything but if you think about it ~ it makes perfect sense. All of the allergy medications I’m on are supposed to turn off the spigot, right? I think that’s exactly what it did for me, not to mention one of my allergy medications has a decongestant. Did my allergy medications keep me from getting sick? Sadly, no. Did they keep me from feeling as bad as everyone else in the house? Yup.

Of course there is a downside to feeling better than a house full of sick people. I got elected nurse, maid, cook, and errand girl and I got virtually no sympathy because my symptoms weren’t visibly dripping. ::sigh::

Have you ever noticed that your allergy medications make cold symptoms less severe??

Photo Credit Rodrigo Senna

Got allergies? You may be depressed at the same time, but one may or may not be causing the other. It’s a, “which came first; the chicken or the egg,” thing. Are my allergies causing my depression because I’m not sleeping? Or am I not sleeping (thereby causing a decrease in my immune system) because I’m depressed?

There are some interesting points on this topic in this article (Click Here).

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/quacktaculous/2758334962/

As a student I suffered most of my academic career with seasonal allergies and allergy induced asthma. Of course I didn’t find out that was why I was always sick until I was an adult. My experiences as a child were useful later, however. When I grew up I became a teacher. Because of what I went through as a child, I was better able to help some of my students.

I’ve had numerous students over the years with allergies and/or asthma. Looking back at my own experiences in school I was able to see what things, in the school environment, that had made me feel worse and try to eliminate them.

• Scented candles and/or potpourri – while not many people are allergic to the perfumes in these items many with seasonal allergies or asthma are sensitive to them, and they can make symptoms worse.
• Cleaning products – again, a sensitivity to the chemicals can make breathing more difficult. I requested that the janitors not clean my classroom with the usual products. Instead I brought products that were less irritating for them to use. I also asked that they clean my room at the end of the day instead of at lunch or during my planning period, thereby reducing the exposure to my students.
• No perfume zone – I explained my past experiences to all of my students. I told them that perfumes/colognes/aftershave etc. could set off an asthma attack or make my allergy symptoms worse (as well as students with similar conditions). Most students liked to spray one or all of these things on after PE but because of my explanation and request did not do so before my class.
• Frequent dusting- While we did have an excellent janitorial staff, they did not have time to dust everything in everyone’s rooms on a regular basis (uhm, ever). Because I know how sensitive I am to dust (as are many allergy and asthma sufferers) I began dusting my room about once a month. Knick Knacks, shelves, air vents, window blinds….basically any horizontal surface.
• No open windows – Pretty self explanatory, right? Less exposure to pollen fewer seasonal allergy symptoms.

What have you done to help your child, or students, deal with seasonal allergies at school?

Photo Credit Chaps 1