There seems to be a sand dune lodged up inside my sinuses. Although the weather here has been as delightful as usual (we only have two flavors, cool and sunny or cool and foggy, the ideal San Francisco summer,) the wind has been just one small step short of a hurricane. It hasn't rained since March, so that wind has lifted all the dust and dirt airborne and plenty of it has found its way up my nose.
Runny noses run in my family. My grandmother, my father, my brothers, at least one of my nieces, and I all go through life clutching a handkerchief. After a lifetime of dealing with snot, I decided to see what was causing it and to try and deal with it, so I slunk off to the thrill of an allergy test. Because all that coughing and wheezing had to be the result of an allergy, right? Right?
Wrong. Turns out I am allergic to absolutely nothing except dust mites, and there's nothing particularly unusual about that, everybody is allergic to dust mites. Instead, I have non-allergic rhinitis, which is medical talk for "runny nose". They don't know what causes it and there's no cure. Those of us cursed with it are just stuck with noses that drip like a faucet that never quite turns off. Just to make things better, it creates a loop: our sinuses get irritated from all the mucus passing through and that makes them create more mucus. Drip drip drip.
And that brings us back to the weather report. One of the things that makes mine worse are breezy days like we've been having this month. So maybe I should amend my earlier claim that I'm not allergic to anything and admit that I am allergic to the wind. I could expand on that, but I need to go blow my nose. Honk.
Breezy boys:
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