The human immune system has a default programming of “tightly wound”. If it doesn’t recognize something, it tries to kill it. It doesn’t bother asking detailed questions, and it only bothers to get to know it at all, so it can identify and kill it even quicker the next time. It’s an elegant system, mostly. Someday, our bodies will immediately recognize COVID as it enters our nose or eye, and destroy the virus before it gets past the front line, because we’ve been exposed to it either through illness or vaccine. Sometimes this system of defense doesn’t work. It’s either too lazy, and it fails to protect us, or it’s too aggressive and attacks things it shouldn’t, like our own thyroid or joints. 

Sometimes, our body throws a big panic-attack about benign things like cat hair, oak pollen, or egg whites. It dials “911” when my next-door neighbor mows the yard, and every immune cell in my body races towards my eyes and nose, like cops that have just heard an “officer down” squawk over the radio. When I was growing up in New York, my mom always referred to this as getting my “Summer Cold”, as the flowers bloomed and the grass grew. It was a minor annoyance. 

When I moved to Texas, I was beset by allergies to everything, from the moment I arrived. I took a job on a lovely green, grassy campus, and lived in a house dwarfed by the wonderful oak tree that shaded it. Every verdant plant I could see or smell shot tiny sneeze-producing spores at my face year round. One particular morning in my first fall, I was teaching pre-algebra to the eighth-graders (Chinquapin ‘99), when my face began to leak. I started a sentence and sneezed, and continued teaching and sniffled, and continued to talk and snarfled, and tried to keep going and snorted, and wiped my nose where I could and snotted, and turned to write on the board and SMEARED A STREAK OF BOOGERY SLIME BEHIND THE CHALKED EQUATION LIKE SOME SORT OF OOZE MONSTER. 

You know how everyone supposedly has an anxiety dream about getting up in front of a room and realizing they’re not wearing pants? This was worse. I would have happily dropped my pants then and there if it could have made me wake up underneath the pollen tree, instead of having to turn around to meet the eyes of the harshest, most jaded, cynical mean girls (and boys) that school had. I’d only been teaching a few weeks! 

(A brief aside. Here now, comes an interesting test of a person’s innate narcissism. Often, we remember our “worst moments” and no-one else who was there has any recollection at all, indicating that we are our own worst narrators, and blow things out of proportion. Through Facebook, I am still in touch with several members of that class, including Eddie DelaTorre. If the ridiculous good luck I cling to holds, none of them noticed or remember. If they do, then it really was as bad as I recall it being).

That day, that moment, I decided that I would have to quit my job and leave Texas, or go see a doctor for medical help, because if I may paraphrase,  I vowed, as G-d as my witness, I would never smear snot on a chalkboard again. I was able to see a local allergist fairly quickly, who promptly put me on a powerful new antihistamine, which worked wonderfully, but did enough damage to my liver that my primary care doctor lectured me sternly on the dangers of being a binge-drinking alcoholic. We stopped that medicine, so I could continue binge-drinking alcohol (I’m kidding), and started allergy shots, in which a small amount of everything that makes my itch was injected into me weekly in an attempt to make me give up and move back to New York. My main side effects of regular allergy shots were pain and a face that frequently looked red and stupid and embarrassed. The injections were fine, but the nurse who gave them to me was pretty and young, and I was socially inept and tried to ask her out. I got shots for an awkward three years after that.

I’ve always thought of my experience with allergies, medicines, and shots to be quite symbolic of a more general human experience. So many of us are bothered, or legitimately debilitated, by “little things” that cause us to wildly overreact compared to the actual threat. The intellectual knowledge that peanut dust isn’t anthrax does nothing to reduce the emergency need for benadryl or an epinephrine shot. If you don’t have access to them, you’re wrecked. I had to go to the doctor’s office every Friday for half a year, then gradually stretch the visit interval out. I had the time, money and schedule freedom, as a teacher, to compliantly complete the plan. And to remind you, that plan was to regularly expose myself to small, safe amounts of something my body was erroneously convinced was potentially deadly. So many people I know aren’t as lucky, even if what they’re facing isn’t actually dangerous, just vexing. Their finances, schedules, commitments to care for others, and lack of access to resources keep them from receiving the help they need to thrive and survive. I’m obviously talking about more than allergies now.