Sunday, April 15, 2012

Short allergy update and Q+A 4

This spring continues to be really horrible for my allergies.  Its not letting up at all!  They have really been messing with my sleep and my ability to get things done.  I did want to make a quick update here and make a quick new Q+A:

Q: Have you had any positive experiences because of your allergies? People you've met or bad situations that were made better maybe? (I always try to look for the good in bad!)
A:
The one big good thing thing that is that because of my allergies is getting to meet my best friend Jessie.  I gave the story of how I met her in one of my early posts.  Becoming friends with her is the one best thing that came from me having allergies.  I can't think of any bad situatiosn that having allergies would help though.  Do you have any examples?  In jr HS and HS I did sometimes use my allergies to get out of going to school.  When I woke up I would deliberatly expose myself to something I was alleric to without my parents knowing and then they saw my allergies being really bad and would let me stay home.  I only did that a few times though.

Q: I know in the anatomy class I took, there was a long-term lab where we dissected cats (humanely acquired, obviously). Have you ever had to deal with a lab when you're working on a subject that you are allergic to?
A: The worst was a botany class with lab in undergrad that I had to take one semester.  I tried to avoid it but it was the only class avaibale for a catagory I needed for my program.  The prof. was very understanding and would let me leave when I needed to and let me do the lab practicals at a different time from the rest of the class (I think not just for me but to not disrupt the rest of the class when they tested too) and he did give me extra time for the practicals.  I did have to make up any lab time I missed though.  I tried using a mask but putting on a mask when already dealing with allergies isn't that helpful.  Having a very runny nose and sneezing fits inside a mask is not good, believe me!  Other than that, I don't think there were too many labs I had major issues with.  Animal dissections in labs already had the skin removed so I guess that was't a problem.  One good thing is that apparently animal dissection labs smell pretty bad and I couldn't smell anything.  I think maybe in general bio we did a flower dissection and dealt with plants a few times but thats about it.

Please keep the questions (and other feedback) coming in the comments, I like doing this.  The more people who ask stuff the more often I can post.