Playing With My Food ~
A journal about food, thought, travel, and life; by Chef & Raconteur Chaz French.

Spring…

It’s finally arrived where I live, temps are ranging from the mid 50’s to mid 70’s and everything is blooming!

Normally this would also mean that I’m stocking up on Flonase, Zyrtec and a handful of other drugs to combat my allergies to all things green and blooming (and also all pollutants and cats).

Last year when I was in France it got so incredibly bad, it was hard to have any fun at all.  I was miserable every day of the trip I was double dosing on Zyrtec & Flonase, I tried sudafed on top of that, and even threw in some Benadryl.
good day
This picture was taken on a good day. Full size here.

On the worst day, I took over 300mg of Benadryl and had double dosed everything else.  Upon my return I realized that my allergies could prevent me from ever living in Paris, which is a long term goal of mine. So I had to do something about it. A few weeks after my return I found an allergist and began getting allergy serum shots.  My reactions to the shots were pretty severe and they had to bring me up to dose very slowly, I’ve been going for 10 months now and am 5 weeks from moving to getting shots every other week instead of weekly.  Just in time for this year’s trip to France.

So here we are, Spring the time of year when everything makes me itch and my nose run, and my eyes water, only this year none of that is happening and I’m not on allergy meds at all. I take one dose of Zyrtec a couple of hours prior to my injections (they insist) and that’s it.

If you suffer from allergies and have the means (check your insurance), I can’t recommend going through the treatments strongly enough.  Now let’s see how they hold up under the foreign pollens of France…

Charles