I can see! It's a miracle!

So it turns out there's a downside--a seamy underbelly, if you will--to these beautiful sunny English days. No one bothered to warn me, but English pollen happens to be the *&*% nastiest £$%& bunch of *^%$ you may ever come across. I'm telling you--it doesn't just want to see me uncomfortable and sneezing and weepy-eyed. It won't rest until I'm fully prostrate on the ground, sobbing and begging for mercy between sneezes as I try to claw my own eyes out.

I've been taking Claratin (the American kind) all week, but possibly England just laughs at American medications, much as it laughs at American chocolate. My American friend Goldilocks is dying, too.

In addition to the Allergies Which Threaten to Close My Throat and Kill Me Outright, there's also the heat factor. Seventy degrees in England and seventy degrees in UT are such very different things, friends. In fact, when my weather pixie showed 81 degrees yesterday I seriously thought, "Eighty-one??? Are you serious? Oh my gosh, we're all gonna die!!!" And then I had to go hide under my bed, even though there are hairy spiders the size of cats under that thing. Yes, the big spiders are back out now. And I just know that one of them is going to come out from under the bed when I'm asleep and then crawl up my nose and eat my brains. Because that's what all spiders secretly dream of.

So it's been a week of sneezing and pill-popping and sniffing and rubbing eyelids that quite possibly have shards of glass beneath them. This morning, though, I woke up feeling strangely calm and comfortable. My eyelids weren't swollen shut, and I could breathe. The air felt cool and lovely. I took some Claratin just because my momma didn't raise me to say no to pharmaceuticals, but perhaps it's going to start getting better.

Or, you know, it's just the calm before England decides to bring out the big guns and finish me off for good.

Posted in: England