As anyone who has been keeping up with this blog can tell you, I'm allergic to…
Well, everything.
I'm allergic to grasses and trees and an assortment of foods…
No medications, as far as I know, though I am sensitive to laughing gas enough that it'll give me panic attacks.
Either way, I was on the road to having to live my life inside some horrible bubble, never to interact with another person again.
To a certain extent, I actually did this to myself when I first came home again, but that was more due to a budding mental illness and less due to a physical ailment of any kind.
So, a bazillion years ago, I was put on the drops. Sublingual allergy drops work like the shots, in that it helps my body slowly learn to not be afraid of these substances. Much like a ninja building up an immunity to poison by ingesting just a little bit over a long period of time, eventually, the body stops over reacting so much.
That's all allergies are.
It's the body overreacting.
In this sense, it is perfect that I would have so many allergies.
To get this medication though, I had to take an allergy test.
Not like this.
Not even a blood test.
It's a skin test.
I bring this up because I'm having the skin test done again to see if anything has changed. Hopefully it has, and hopefully it's changed in a positive way.
Blood tests are useful because you can test for a lot of things all at once without any direct risk to the person being tested. The problem is that they aren't always particularly accurate.
The skin test is VERY accurate.
You'd think that would make it worth it.
I bring this all up because not only have I had the test before, but I'm about to have it again in a couple of weeks.
I'm dreading this.
Obviously, I survived last time. The problems are that
A. It's uncomfortable and I've become a flighty ninny who flips shit and thinks she's dying every time she even has a strange itch or needs to cough for a second.
B. I'm worried about my tattoos because it makes little bumps which can spread onto the arms and sometimes they go to the back…
C. I don't really want to know if it's gotten worse. I want to somehow ONLY be told if it's better, and
D. I now associate the test with humiliation.
This post will mostly be about that last one.
As jumpy and panic ridden as I may be now, when I was a kid, I just bottled everything. I'd either be perfectly pleasant and happy, or I was a ball of silent misery. Typically, that misery came about when I wasn't being left well enough alone.
I didn't like attention, especially from strangers, and I didn't like the idea of ever smiling when I didn't have a reason to do so. This led to a lot of people thinking I didn't have a sense of humor. I had one, just not when I felt embarrassed or like I was the butt of the joke.
I'll tangent for a moment here because the other time this sort invasion of space was a problem was when I had a mat cut out of my hair.
Instead of just cutting the damn thing out themselves, my parents took me to a hair stylist, hoping he or she could take it apart and not have to cut out a chunk of hair. It was underneath anyway, so I gave no shits.
Apparently my hair makes an amazing accidental dred. It was perfect enough that the woman being paid to slice it off instead opted to call her friends and random patrons over to gaze upon the atrocity under my hair.
Mind you, this was my own damn fault because my hair was unruly and I didn't like it being brushed.
Eventually, she cut it out of my hair, but not before I was in tears, hating the world, feeling hideous. In retrospect, it was a compliment, but I just felt like a freak show at the time.
Similarly, there was the allergy test.
It was either tomato or wild North American grass that enveloped my shoulder in an itchy red mass of hate…
But what was worse was the thing on my hip.
"Dust" mutated into this horrible patch on my left hip which resembled…
A bunny.
I had a goddamn dust buddy on my butt.
Dust
Bunny
on my
BUTT.
And so the world had to be shown.
The next half an hour was spent with nurses, doctors, patients, small children and everyone under the sun laughing at my rabbit-ass while I sat itchy, embarrassed, and once again hating the world.
And now I'm going to have this test done again.
I'm still just as prideful as I ever was as a child, but now I'm panicky and vocal.
This might not end well.
