In 1994, my family lived in one of those post-Soviet Union little villages with a population of just about a thousand people.
Everybody knew everybody. Very poor families that lead an extremely simple lifestyle without much of modern-day conveniences. As a little kiddo I spent countless hours playing outside.
I practically lived out there and had an enormous amount of fun with my friends.
We would gather as a group of four or five people and play games like “hide and sick”, “lava”, soccer and many many others.
One of the most popular games we played was soccer with an empty 2L. plastic bottle of Coca-cola as a ball. Because no one could afford to buy a proper soccer ball.
Hence life taught us an invaluable lesson—you gotta appreciate, and work with what you have, and make the best of it.
And even when someone’s family was able to finally afford it, it would be torn apart within a week or less.
Our village didn’t have any special fields to play soccer on — just a combination of sand, mud, rocks, and broken glass and whatnot.
We would fill it almost halfway with something like sand, water, mud or any other stuff, just to make the bottle a bit heavier, so that when you hit it would actually fly in the direction in which you intended it to.
That’s important more so when it’s really windy.
When the so cold soccer-coke-bottle fell apart, we would go ahead and find some carbon box or something else we could use as a substitution to a soccer ball to play the game.
We would set some rocks or tree sticks, and use it as soccer gates. Imagination and creativity of little kids are truly amazing! Who says you need a lot to be happy?
How it all started.
One day I was outside playing hide and sick. I couldn’t understand what was going on, out of the blue, my eyes started to itch. Rapidly getting worse and worse.
I started to scratch them like a maniac, temporarily relieving the pain, but ultimately making it so much worse.
I couldn’t stop touching them because the itchiness didn’t wanna go away.
It bothered me the whole evening.
You know that white part of your eye, called sclera?
Well, mine wasn’t white anymore. It was entirely red.
The eyes looked so swollen and inflamed they were literally sticking out of the orbits. That looked so scary.
Because I irritated the eyes so much, I started losing sight. In the end, I couldn’t even open my eyelids.
My friends had to help me get home.
It was roughly a mile away from the place where we hang out.
The moment I got home, my mom saw my face, she almost fainted. I looked like a living dead.
We tried to wash my eyes and my face, thinking that I might have gotten some sand in my eyes and then It got them irritated. One other thing my parents thought that it looked like a fly or bee bite right in the eye.
My mom and my stepfather were scared like never before. They called a family doctor. At the time we lived in a little village, with a population of about 1,000 people.
There were no hospitals, but It had 2 doctors that lived in the area. So if you needed to visit them, you couldn’t. They’d come to you whenever they were available.
One of them was able to come that evening. She told us that I had some sort of allergic reaction to something. She blamed the ecology, the government, and tons of other people I don’t know.
She recommended that I see a special doctor. There weren’t any in 500 miles in any direction. So I didn’t get to see one up until my family moved to a city. That was about 7 years later.
That experience was the first time I was introduced to the allergies.
To be honest I’ve never heard of them before. As a little kid, I didn’t care much at all. I just wanted it all to get back to normal, so I can go outside and hang out with my friends.
That’s all I really wanted. To feel normal again. That wasn’t the case, though.
From that day on, my allergies just started developing. In the first year, I was seriously sick for about a month, when tree pollen was in season. Especially it hit me hard when cottonwood started to blossom.
That all happened back in Russia, in 1994.
The year after, my allergies lasted for about two months. And, yep, the next year it happened again. And that time it went on for about two months and a half.
Every year from that point on, the duration of my allergy season was increasing drastically, to the point where it is right now. Which is all year long.
The most severe impact on my life is from early April till late November.
It gets better in winter.
Another thing is that not only the duration and the severity of the allergy season increased and got drastically worse, but a lot of new symptoms appeared.
In addition to insane eye irritation you get swollenness of different parts of the body, sneezing(extremely strong and painful in the chest and throat; it feels like you sneeze your lungs out), runny nose, anxiety, watery eyes, difficulty breathing, wheezing, sore throat.
Also, things that look like skin eczema, and hives all over your body, with the majority being on the forehead, and upper back.
In addition to all that – it exhausts you. It breaks your sleeping pattern(it’s hard to fall asleep with all of the congestion and itchiness) – so you wake up fatigued in the morning.
Your day hasn’t even started yet and you’re already tired.
You often get a headache, in addition to that, draining all of your energy out that you didn’t have. It irritates you so that you become anxious. It makes you very cranky and jumpy.
It completely takes away all the joy in life. Literally.
It makes you miserable. Totally miserable.
You can’t even function normally. You can’t participate in most of your fun activities with your friends and the worst thing is that it makes you feel NOT WANT TO.
Not because you are suffering and feeling miserable, but because doing things outside your home makes the symptoms that much worse.
To the point where I had to call in sick from school, and later in life from university and my job and on the worst days spending up to a week laying in bed, recovering.
Because your eyes were already irritated so much, you couldn’t even watch TV or play the Dendy (a Russian junior Nintendo console clone).
Looking at the screen puts an immense amount of strain on them, irritating them further. Hence, more inflammation, more pain, and more misery.
Something to note, the TVs back then, in 1994, in Russia, were not particularly great for your eyes.
They were really small – about 11 inch up to 17. The resolution was so low, quality and colors were bad as well, so you would need to focus harder when you watch it and you had to sit very close to it, if not right in front of it like we kids did.
Even if you had no allergies, watching this kind of TVs was putting so much strain on your eyes that you needed to take constant breaks to relax them a bit to avoid a headache.
At that time, in my village, you could only get your TV to watch one channel, and if your antenna was strong enough you might pick up 2 more.
The antenna back then – of course I am referring to a couple of empty tuna-tin cans or 2 aluminum soda cans all wired together using copper and sticking right into your TV’s back panel.
Why not use a regular Antenna that people put on the roof?
Because…welcome to Post-Soviet Union village, where people are used to cutting the antenna cables off and selling them to scrap metal recyclers. The chance of that happening to your antenna was 100%.
It wasn’t even a question of whether or not that would happen to you — it was just a matter of time.
The 90s were rough on Russia. it was particularly hard to survive, people were forced to search for any means to put food on the table. Collecting metal as a second full-time job was just one of them.
However, there were other people who would cut your Antenna cable, just because they didn’t like it hanging there from the roof, going down to your window. Mad Lads.
Envy is real. “If I am not watching TV, neither will you”— more common than you know.
So to control the quality of a signal of the tin-can-antennas, you would need to twist and turn “your piece of equipment” that is hanging on by the closest window 🙂 Fun times.
The picture and audio were noisy as hell.
Hey, but I am not gonna lie, I enjoyed it anyway. Thoroughly.
What a delight, when you finally twist and turn your “device” in time, for your favorite movie. So you get to REALLY savor that little victory.
Learned from a very young age of the importance of being grateful for what we had. Appreciation is a big deal and it can make the way you experience your life way better.
Although some other times you spend more time tweaking the “antenna” than watching something. That’s where the complexity of a foul language comes into play. You learn it all.
Thank god I had a brother, haha. We could take turns, one of us would watch, another one would stand and try to turn it one way or the other, trying to catch a steady signal.
Priceless experience. People born in the 21st century probably wouldn’t even know what the hell I am talking about. That’s something to remember.
We were taught to appreciate the little things early on. One of the most important if not THE most important lessons of life.
Anyway, back to the story.
There is one symptom that I hate the most. I wanted to point out that one separately from all the others. It’s a white ropey discharge in the eyes that feels something like when a fruit fly gets in your eye and you can’t pull it out.
Feels like someone pokes your eyes with a needle.
It almost always goes along with watery eyes and mucus discharge. Very painful, annoying and frustrating.
You’d often ask somebody to help you get that mucus out of your eyes by using something like a cloth handkerchief. At the time, they were super popular in Russia.
Practically every member of a household had them.
When they took that stringy mucus discharge out of your eyes, it resembles stringy transparent worms. Real-like WORMS that they just pulled out from YOUR eyes.
Now, just imagine that. Because like I mentioned it feels like some fruit fly got in your eye and it’s moving around, and it’s hurting you.
And then you see that it looks like worms and it feels like they’re moving around. And there is always a ton of it in your eyes. And it hurts badly.
That definitely traumatized me as a kid. It made me freak out so many times even when I was in my early 20s when the allergy symptoms got drastically worse so that there were much more of that discharge every time.
You don’t have to take my word for it. If you are not very sensitive just go to google.com and select the “images” category and type this in – “white ropey discharge in red pinky eye”. Scroll down and take a look for yourself. Or go on youtube, and get traumatized for life. You are welcome.
In the year 2000, we moved to a bigger city, Magnitogorsk with a population of about 400,000 people.
There was one allergy clinic in the whole city.
Actually, there were no allergy clinics in the city at all, but there was one private ASTHMA clinic that had “an experimental allergy program.”
No surprise here at all, since I remember so well, at that time nobody knew anything about allergies, because It was so uncommon.
In fact, I haven’t met anyone else who had allergies until I was 19. And even then, there were just a handful few and the allergies they had were very mild compared to mine. Just occasional sneezing and runny nose during cottonwood season.
If you qualified for the program in the clinic, you didn’t have to pay for the treatment, you just gave your consent, however, the results were not guaranteed (by the way, in Russia, medical care in public hospitals was free for residents of the city).
On the first day, I went to the clinic, Doctors did a skin test.
Which is when they scratched my arm and then applied a few drops of a solution with the things I could possibly be allergic to, called allergens.
Then you wait and see if the area gets irritated, meaning that you have an allergic reaction to it and they measure the size of that area to determine how severe the allergy is (on the scale of 1 to 4)
So, the test results were such: Grass (severity 4/4), trees(4/4), roach(2/4), and some other milder ones.
Haha, I remember there was another one, — horse dandruff (2/4). For God’s sake, I was laughing so hard on that one.
Why in the world would they even test me for this one? 🙂 How many horses did I see in those 8+ years I lived in the city? 🙂
The answer is none.
Anyway…
That asthma clinic was well known in the city for treating patients who had breathing problems. But that was the first year when immunotherapy(IT) was introduced in our city.
And the results were theoretical, the doctors were saying it’s a hit or miss chance of getting better. It might work for you, or it might not.
My mom knew somebody who knew somebody who grew up with somebody’s uncle whose daughter was working there, so they helped me get into the program.
I was just a kid, I didn’t like barbers and doctors more than anything.
Not only I was afraid of them, I strongly believed until my late 30s that they were sent from hell to torture good people for fun. Turns out, I wasn’t wrong you know.
Every time I’d see them for those shots, it looked like they enjoyed hurting me a bit too much, so that’s how I knew that to be true for sure 🙂
So the treatment in the clinic was allergy shots (IT, or Immunotherapy).
Shots had a solution made up of water and an allergen (that thing you are allergic to) in different proportions.
They start very very small, with a dominant amount of water and a tiny % of allergen. And in time, they move on to more allergen, less water. It’s a very slow process.
The treatment was for seasonal allergies only. So they only did the shots at late fall and winter, when the allergies were not in season, so it wouldn’t anyhow affect the treatment(*In the US, they do it all year long).
Those shots hurt like hell. It wasn’t that bad at the very beginning when the dose was very little. It was painful but I could take it.
After sometime when they increased the dose the shots started to really hurt. And I mean really really hurt.
Imagine now you pour some oil on a frying pan, heat it up until it boils and then you spill that on your skin.
That was exactly how it felt. Now imagine they poured that oil through a needle into your triceps area.
Slowly.
Now, they get really creative and they repeat the process three times on every appointment(I had 3 different shots per visit). To be fair, not all shots hurt the same.
The one that I am the most allergic to was the one that caused the most agonizing pain. In my case, that’s grass and ragweed.
I was coming up with a million excuses not to go to that torture house. Needless to say, I was frightened by them.
That was probably one of the reasons I “disliked” hospitals so much. I couldn’t take the pain anymore.
I finished the first stage, that’s one winter. Then I was looking for any excuse not to go there anymore. I chickened out.
So when the next winter, my mom saw me suffering and constantly complaining about them and she finally agreed with me that the shots didn’t help at all.
If anything they made it all worse. To give you an idea of what happened: the allergy shots were done in winter, and then spring comes and my allergies are just as severe and even worse than the year before.
Somehow I was able to convince my mother to withdraw me from the program.
So the year after the shots, I felt worse than ever and then some.
I completely lost my ability to breathe through my nose.
Both nostrils are constantly inflamed, and swollen and I can’t use it to breathe anymore since the openings are way too narrow. So I had to adapt and to breathe 100% through my mouth. Which by the way, sucks.
It has always been either stuffed or runny or swollen or all three. And as a result, I couldn’t smell anything.
And in almost 20 years of not being able to use it, I’ve lost the sense almost entirely.
Nowadays I can smell only for brief periods of time on a good day, then for about 6 hours I can’t, then again I get it back for another 5-10 minutes, and then again it disappears.
It’s not that the nostrils are shut. Even when you manage to inhale through your swollen nostrils, the smell doesn’t register for some reasons.
You just feel the sensation of breathing but there is little to no input; any aromas are absent. So weird. No idea how that works.
Now I learned to determine important smells through my mouth and tongue.
For example, when there is a smell of gas, I can’t notice it, unless I get a headache and that bitter feeling on the tongue— that’s how I know it.
However, you’ve got to be awake to feel that. Let’s say there is gonna be a gas leak at night — that’s an oopsie! I wouldn’t notice it until its too late.
That’s one of the reasons why my kitchen stove, doesn’t have those plastic gas stove switches, that you use to turn on the gas and control its level.
It’s a proactive measure so that one of the four cats of mine wouldn’t accidentally turn the gas on.
Which happened a few times before, and if it wasn’t for my girlfriend coming home and noticing it, I wouldn’t be writing this right now 🙂
For a lot of people losing the sense of smell would be a disaster. It sure was for me at first. But no, not anymore.
It’s been almost 20 years I got used to not having it, so it doesn’t bother me anymore.
You’d be surprised the things you can live without.
Just imagine what a unique way to perceive the world being colorblind and not being able to smell anything 😄
So for the next 15 years, I was trying to cope with allergies in the best way I could. So much fun and joy!
Coping with life is NOT the WAY to live. I learned it the hard way. You shouldn’t.
Let me give you an example of what It actually looks like…
Just another day of my life 10 years ago
Waking up at 7 am. Wash your face in cold water. Use eye drops and pills. On my way to college. Trees and grass are everywhere. Trying to avoid them as much as possible.
Not feeling well. Can’t wait for the classes to finish. The symptoms overwhelm you. And even though you’ve already maxed out the daily dose of your allergy pills, it doesn’t make it any better.
The fluorescent lights in the classroom make your eyes hurt and more irritated, so I was trying to either shut the eyes or not to lift my head up as much as possible. It doesn’t solve the problem, it just relieves some pain.
Your eyes get really really red. You get so much of that white ropey/stringy discharge in your eyes, that it feels like your eyes are being poked at every 5 seconds.
It hurts so much that you can’t see nor function normally. The eyes have reflexes —when you feel like something is in your eye, you instantly SHUT It.
The tears and mucus come out – you get what is called watery eyes. That white discharge is not going away. It just appears more and more and more.
So the classes are over. Meanwhile, you have a headache, anxiety. Your confidence vanishes. You feel like everyone is looking at you.
And guess what —they actually kinda do. Since you’re acting all strange and that is weirding them out.
None of them have seen anything quite like that. You look like a red-eyed vampire…or a stoner. Or both.
You run straight home, even though your friends are inviting you someplace fun on this wonderful day. However, you are well aware that you can’t come with them.
But what you do is you tell them you have something “important” to do.
Or your family is asking you to help them with something.
Every time you come up with another sometimes creative and yet ludicrous excuse why you can’t go.
The minute you get home you wanna make sure all the windows are shut so that you can limit your exposure to pollen.
You run to the bathroom and wash your face with cold water, trying to wash out all of the allergens that are still on your body reducing the itchiness.
You should take a cold shower. The colder the better.
I would keep my air conditioning up and running. Low temperature helps a lot with relieving the pain and itchiness and also reducing the swollenness.
That’s why the next thing I would do is I’d use eyedrops again. Then I would apply a cold compress to the area of my closed eyes and chill for about 20 minutes to half-hour.
I noticed early that applying cold to the area of eyes makes me feel so much better.
To make a compress I would normally grab a towel, soak it in cold water, throw in some ice cubes in a plastic bag, wrap the towel around it and apply it to the eyes area.
Such a relief. If your eyes are bothering you a lot, you should give it a try, you will love this. It does wonders 🙂
So after some time, later that night you’ll get a little bit better. The eye drops and pills help to ease up some of the symptoms. But unless you are able to completely isolate yourself from being exposed, your symptoms won’t go away.
You might able to control some of it, like watery eyes and the redness, but the rest of the symptoms are there to stay, still making you miserable and making you unable to function normally and enjoy your life.
By the way, what I am talking about here is when I am having a “good day”.
A bad day is exactly the same, but the symptoms get worse and they won’t go away for a week. This is where you have to inevitably call in sick and spend time in bed, without going outside and exposing yourself to allergens.
On a bad day, the conjunctivitis is so severe that the eyes are just so swollen and there is so much mucus, that you can’t even open them.
Even if you clean them and wash them with cold water, the swollenness might not disappear for days, sometimes for a week.
However, what you can do is to use cotton pads and soak them in some freshly brewed black tea. It’s a great way to help you “unglue” your eyes. You can gently wipe your eye-lids of all the mucus discharge without causing much pain and further irritation.
I’ve had bad days where I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed at all. All-day. I missed classes, I missed work. And more important I missed out on life.
And that’s not half as bad if you have a loved one or somebody who deeply cares about you. Who constantly worries about you and your well-being.
Imagine how it makes them feel when they see your suffering and they are unable to help you at all. They feel powerless.
So what they do is they suffer along with you. Now imagine all the attention and love and care that they need and you are not able to deliver.
How are you gonna take care of them, if you are not even able to take care of yourself first?
You might say to yourself, ‘yeah, but that it’s just one bad day. Or a few bad days while the season lasts. It’s not gonna affect my life that much.
How bad can it get, right?
Oh, you cannot even begin to imagine! Here is the thing.
That’s every day while the season lasts. And this is where I want you to pay close attention.
Early in my life, the season lasted for 1 month and the allergies were mild.
After a few years, it had gotten drastically worse, — to the point that the season doesn’t begin and end, it’s everlasting throughout the year. So the bad days are every day.
This is no joke.
Imagine not being able to spend any time outside your house without becoming ill.
Your girlfriend or boyfriend is gonna ask you out, and you can’t go. NOT ONE time.
That will change your lifestyle. That will change your relationships.
How do you like the idea of living in a closed box for life, and any attempt of going outside is faced with always present suffering and misery?
Is that the type of life you want?
If the answer is yes, well then, keep doing what you’re doing.
You’re gonna keep ignoring what’s happening in your life long enough, your life will ignore you.
It took me decades to learn the lesson.
Which is really simple.
Allergies are serious business. So REGARD IT as such.
Go see a specialist and ask them for your treatment options.
And commit to it.
Don’t make excuses. Make time. Your life depends on it, and the quality of life of your loved ones. If you don’t wanna do it for your self, do it for them.
They will appreciate it.
Don’t live a limited life. You should enjoy the journey along the way.
Because at this stage of my life the allergies are so severe there is no medication that helps much at all.
By now, I can tell you this, in 22+ years that I have the allergies I have tried nearly EVERYTHING there is on the market. Over the counter and by prescription. Also, in Russia and in the US.
At my stage, unless you are able to fully limit your exposure to allergens, nothing helps much with the symptoms at all.
I also tried some unorthodox ways to help with the allergies including some ol’grandma secret recipes, some shamanistic rituals, and remedies that probably are banned in some places:)
About three years ago, I went to an allergy clinic, here in Brooklyn. That changed my life. And the life of people who I care the most.
They proposed that I do the allergy shots. I’ve mentioned to them that I tried that once, it didn’t work out.
But they ensured me that this time it will be different.
And yeah, the same thing happened this time.
Just like the shots I used to get back in Russia when I was a kid, they didn’t work in the 1st year at all. If anything they made me feel much worse.
But dear god, what a change comes next.
EVERYTHING changes.
In about 1 year and 2 months, I noticed a massive improvement in my symptoms.
MASSIVE improvement. The first time I did the shots I didn’t commit to it, and I didn’t take it seriously.
I missed appointments. I made excuses. And when I used to have those bad days where on the scale of 1 to 10, it was a constant 9+.
Nowadays it barely gets to 5.
And the number of bad days I have per year went down from nearly ALL year long to just a few episodes, which I CAN control.
I used to not go outside unless I absolutely must.
Nowadays I don’t spend much time at home. Things are different now.
To make up for all those years I couldn’t spend near trees and grass(which is obviously everywhere), I find any reason possible to get out there.
Whether it’s to have lunch, a picnic, to read a book or to work on a project. I am in. I am doing it.
Just a few years ago, I couldn’t see myself doing any of that.
It’s hard to put into words how much I’ve missed out on life. Now I am making up for all the things I had been deprived of.
Taking care of my health, allowed me to get to the point of sustained happiness I’ve never thought possible.
I am the happiest I’ve ever been and major credit goes to the allergy treatment.
Even when I was undergoing treatment, I was still skeptical about it.
I couldn’t even imagine the effect this would have on my life.
Everything has drastically improved
The pollen doesn’t affect me nearly as much as it used to. I’ve gone hiking, I’ve spent countless hours in the park, I’ve ridden a bicycle every single day to enjoy the outdoors and I feel great.
Just to give you an example of how much it changed my life, and it changed me. I used to hate doctors and hospitals.
Now, I actually look forward to the days I get allergy shots. I RUN to the hospital with a huge smile. I am always super excited and pumped.
At the time of writing this, I‘ve had about north of 130 doctor’s visits for that treatment. That’s about 390 shots. Do you know how many times I missed my appointment?
Not a single one.
And not just that, but I also have never been late to one either. That’s a lot of dedication and commitment. And oh my god does it worth it! Feeling alive again.
I don’t wanna lie and over hype you. There are still bad days in a year, obviously. But the thing is there are just so few of them that they almost don’t count. Compare that to feeling terrible for a whole season… season THAT NEVER ENDS.
And even though the treatment along with the meds help a lot, your best bet of staying well and feeling amazing is still to try to limit your exposure to what you are allergic to as little as possible.
Get used to that. It’s okay.
I am not sponsored in any way by anybody to promote the Allergy shots.
I feel passionate and hyped about because it transformed my life.
And I waited almost 22 years for my allergies to improve on its own and all I did was coping instead of living.
I tried to move from city to city. From place to place. Changing lifestyles. Changing lots of things.
Nothing worked.
I really wish and hope to bring awareness to the fact that coping with allergies is NOT THE WAY TO GO about it! That’s a horrible plan.
I was taught to just men up. But that’s stupid. That doesn’t work in this case. Your health will decline if you don’t take necessary time to take care of it. And also, why suffer UNNECESSARY when you can do something about that?
There is gonna be a lot of things happening in your life that will make you suffer for sure. You don’t need to ask for it, it’ll come. That’s given. But don’t add one more thing to that lengthy list.
I wish somebody would have told me, what I am telling you— that you can stop all this suffering, once and for all, and be happy.
Go see a specialist and see what can be done in your specific case. I did and that was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
EDITED: It’s been over three years, since I first stared doing allergy-shots immunotherapy(IT). Up until this day, I still haven’t missed nor have I been late to my allergy appointments. That’s should tell you something. Not only they work, but they’ll remind you something you’ve long forgotten. That is how good life is! (I am not sponsored by anyone or anything to endorse the allergy treatment. This is 100% my opinion based on my experience. I’m just so grateful I’ve found this in my life, and it was and still is a game changer!)
PS: Thank you very much for taking so much of your time and reading my story. I greatly appreciate you. This means the world to me!
I like reading other people stories and recognize their struggles, as it gives you a new perspective on that of your own.
In addition to that, you see that other people deal with the real stuff, and it makes you realize that your own case might not be “that bad”. And so It forces you to stop complaining and actually inspires you to do something about your problems.
