My stupid body

Yeah, it's acting up again.

I'd been hiving up off and on the past week, I was blaming it on one of the lab rooms that smells musty, has roof leaks, and has NO air circulation in it. I got a bad batch of hives after teaching in there.

Well, yesterday I dinked around here at work for a while - but only in my office - working on updating a manuscript.

Woke up this morning at 4:30 to go to the bathroom. Thought, "The left side of my lip feels weird." I felt of it and was immediately completely awake - it was swollen, hived up. So I kind of freaked out. I told myself it was OK because I could still breathe, I didn't need to go to the ER just then. But I did get up and dress just in case.

I took a dose of Zantac and a not-quite-full-sized adult dose of Benadryl (I have the liquid on hand so I can take smaller than normal doses; usually it knocks me out and I can tell my reflexes are funky because I keep making typos and having to correct them as I type this). Sat up for a while and wondered what to do.

I knew I didn't want to go to the ER; besides the factor of maybe having an awful wait if there were accident victims or heart attack people or other people with a more serious problem than mine, I knew what they'd do would be to pump me full of a corticosteroid and then threaten to admit me because my blood pressure was too high. (That happened once before: about a dozen years ago, when I first moved down here, I got into a bad nest of fire ants doing research and got stung about 20 times. I started to have what felt like maybe the beginnings of anaphylaxis (but again: no breathing problems), so I went to the ER and they put me on a steroid drip. Then, when they were checking me out, the orderly was like, "Mmmmmmnnn....your bp is reading 170 over 90, that's pretty high, why don't we admit you overnight for observation?" and my response was: "You're taking my bp in the arm that was hooked up to a saline drip for three hours, and that also got a big dose of a steroid medicine, and you're wondering about my bp being high?"  Later on I found out that, allegedly, if the hospital isn't "full," they try to "encourage" late-evening ER patients to stay for observation.

At any rate. I waited until shortly before 9 am (no MLP reruns for me this week, sad) and went out to the local Urgent Care place. I was really nervous - I don't like going to unfamiliar doctors because I've had some bad experiences (the worst: an internist I started going to who, when I went in for a flu shot and just a flu shot, started off her appointment with me by offering to prescribe weight loss medications. I know I'm overweight, but I don't want to take weight loss medications, because I frankly think they're more dangerous than the weight is, if a person otherwise has a healthy lifestyle).

Also, I admit I was kind of dreading the thought of a shot of corticosteroids in the butt; those hurt.

At any rate: the PA I saw was the kind of doctor I'd like to have for my "regular" doctor, I wish I could find one like him. He was very nice and respectful and recognized the fact that I knew how the human body worked. I asked him if he thought I needed a corticosteroid medication and he said he was not a fan of them, both because they're hard on the body but also that it was his experience that in people with hives, they cause rebound effects where the hives get worse after you go off them.

So he suggested trying Singulair; he said that for people with facial hives it often led to them clearing up. He also noted that my lip seemed to be less swollen than when I came in. (It still feels swollen to me but it looks much better than it did). He said he only did corticosteroids as a last resort, if the person was having breathing problems.

He did start laughing - and then immediately apologize - when I told him I was a botanist. But I said, "No, it's cool, I get that it's really stupid that I'm a botanist that is allergic to the outdoors, I don't have a problem with you laughing." And it's true. It is a really stupid thing. It's like being a vet who is allergic to animal dander.

He said since I couldn't change careers (and even if I did, I couldn't avoid molds, which are probably the cause of the hives), so the best thing to do is to manage the symptoms. So I'm on quite a regimen of different antihistamines that have different effects. (He said there was no contraindication about using them together).

I'll be glad when it dries out a little, though. Hopefully that will make the hives go down; I had far fewer over the fall and winter.

One request, though, since I live alone and might not always be cognizant of this: If, over the next couple months I sound "different" on here, like more angry or more depressed, drop me a note and let me know? (I've also warned my chair). Apparently a side effect of Singulair is that it can cause mood disorders, but apparently that's more likely in people who've already had them, but still, I'm a little bit leery of it.

(My chair said she took it, too, but that she found it sometimes made her "stupid," meaning she forgot stuff easily. Not so cool.)

And something that's a little sad, but probably shows off how sensitive I am about my weight? When the intake nurse weighed me, my weight on their scale was six pounds less than it was at my gynecologists. My scientist-brain says that's probably because the scales were calibrated differently - theirs might read low and hers read high. But my less-logical brain is going "I lost six pounds in a month of just being more careful about how I eat and not snacking!" Of course, a pound or two of that could be due to my not having wanted to eat these past couple days because of the stomach thing.

ETA: I took the first Singulair about an hour ago. I think it's working! I can feel the swelling of my lip going down even more now. I'm very hopeful that this will be the thing that ends my hives. And my hands aren't itchy like they often are.