Allergies and support animals

Thought I forgot about my blog?  Nope.  Just been distracted and constantly not knowing what to post about.

I was thinking about something though:  Service animals and emotional support animals.

I am in the frustrating place of being an animal lover and highly allergic to pretty much anything with fur.  I wonder if part of the reason why my cat allergies are so bad is that I tried to keep my 2 cats long after I developed allergies.

I never want to deny anyone their service animal or their support animal, but its been getting harder for me to deal with as more and more people have them.  When I can, I'll leave the area, or get as far away as I can and suffer through it.  I don't want to complain to any of the people or make an issue, but I wonder if there is a better way for me to deal with it.

Belive me, I'd rather be able to be near them and talk to the owners about how much I like their animals, but my allergies are just too severe.  It just sucks having to avoid something you really like and not really being able to fully avoid it anyway.

Oh, I should mention an allergy-related dream I had recently:
A company had these 3 flowers that were useful in many ways.  They had to keep them in sperate rooms otherwise they would react somehow and damage each other and they just had one of each.  For me, if I was exposed to them in a certain order it would neutralize all my allergies for an couple of hours.  I had to expose myself to them in the reverse order before time was up or all my allergies would return and the flowers would never work for me again.  The reverse order however would bring some of my allergies back for a couple of hours - and it was random which ones.  After that I could let the time elapse and my allergies would slowly return to normal but I could still use the flowers.  If I was exposed to the flowers in any other order, nothing happened.

So, that's it for today.  I still exist so feel free to drop me a line or chat.  sneezykate@hotmail.com works for e-mail, skype, and hangouts.

Seeking opinons, and venting about mean stuff

I am getting close to graduating, and I have been trying to find good jobs.  I got offered a pretty good opportunity (its the best one I have bene able to find), but there is an issue.  Its doing research, but before I can have the job, I need to be an intern (paid) with them for 6 to 9 months.  Its a rules thing, and also to make sure I am a good match and I like working there.  Intern stuff is mainly being a lab tech.  The issue I have is that even though I wont be working directly with animals, I will be near them a lot.  I told them about my allergies, and that's why I don't have to actually work with them.  So I am wondering what to do - I am worried that my allergies might be so bad that I can't work well, and then they aren't going to want me anymore.  Of course I am also worried about being exposed to allergens constantly for so long.  The thing is, its a really good opportunity, and once the internship is over I won't have to be around the animals.

I got to thinking about mean things people have said to me about my allergies.  Some I wasn't meant to hear, and some I think were misguided attempts to be nice.  It got to bugging me lately, so I wanted to list some of the things that have been said within the last week or so:

You'd be very attractive if it wasn't for your allergies
Does she do anything else besides sneeze?
Are you sure its allergies?  You might be sick, and I don't want to catch anything
Maybe its all in your head?
Your allergies are being very disruptive
If you would blow your nose your allergies wouldn't be so bad

I also hate when I get 'advice' like the last one, but they don't seem to understand if I tell them I tried/it doesn't work, they should believe me and not argue with me.  Ugh!

I haven't gotten any new questions.  I am wondering if my last post wasn't very interesting?  please feel free to comment and to contact me!

Service animals

(I meant to post this back in October, but I just recently discovered I never hit the 'post' button!)

I'm very allergic to dogs, and other animals in general (cats are my worst).  Over the years, there have seen more and more service dogs around.  It hasn't been an issue for me until recently.  I have seen some around at the school, but I never needed to have much interaction with people with service dogs.  I have been running into some problems now though because there are service dogs in some of my classes.  One class is a pretty small class, and it gets bad for me pretty quick, so I sometimes have been skipping classes and gettign notes from people and/or looking at material on-line. 

I kind of worry that dander for the service dogs will stay around in the classrooms (I doubt they clean classrooms that well!) and cause me more problems even when the dogs aren't around.

Thats whats been on my mind allergy-wise lately.  Please make comments, and please give me some questions to use in a Q+A.  I am going to make an effort to post more by talking about any allergy-related things that happen to me, but I might forget or put it off too long if they aren't that major.