Apparently, due to the long exposure to heat (and the fact that my office is never cooler than 80 degrees these days), I've developed something akin to cholinergic urticaria. I hive up - even if I just scratch an itch or if there's pressure on some part of my body, like my wrist when I use the mouse for a while.
It goes away overnight, when I'm at home in my cooler house. But it's annoying and it does hurt a little bit. And it freaks people out. One of my colleagues saw the wheal that had developed on my wrist and asked me if I had gotten into poison ivy again.
I've gone back on loratidine every day to see if that helps (it's essentially an allergic reaction: yes, I'm allergic to heat, apparently). I don't like doing that but I see no way around it.
I should have guessed this would happen: first of all, I have very thin, very fair skin (you can see the veins under my skin very easily). And second, I used to get hives sometimes from too-hot showers.
And also, at times, I've shown a tendency to "dermographia" - scratching or pressure leaves a raised welt. (Several of the medical sites about hives have photograph of someone with dermographia, where they have "written" "Hives" on their arm by rubbing the shape of the letters with a tongue depressor or something on their skin. You can imagine that I don't find that particularly amusing or clever.)
If this doesn't improve, or if this is how our summers are going to be from now on (gets hot in May, doesn't ever stop being hot, has many strings of days over 100 degrees), I may have to start looking into jobs in other parts of the country. I don't know how many more years I can tolerate a month of over 100 degree temperatures.
2 comments:
Any chance you could take your summer vacation in August and go somewhere cooler? Does your office have windows that you could cover somehow to keep sun out?
So far, it's a fluke. The average temperature through last night in OKC has been 87.5; were this to persist for the whole month, it would be the third-hottest August on record. (Down in your neck of the woods, it's probably a degree warmer, but I don't have that set of climatological records handy.) Then again, I've been here for three of the Top Ten. (Then again again, I've been here for 30 percent of the period for which they have records, which is less than 120 years.)
Incidentally, the worst was 1936, during the Dust Bowl: 88.7.
I have one advantage here: as the attendant to a server farm, I experience the same temperatures as the $150,000 worth of hardware.
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