Notes on allergies (part 2)

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
June 12, 2015

At some point in the past half-decade or so, a doctor recommended that I address my allergies by taking, well, allergy medicine.

It was a simple enough thing, or so it seemed: Just swallow one pill a day. For various reasons, most of which involved convenience, I began taking the pill before bed. This worked out nicely, I thought, because at bedtime, I’m typically either at home or at a place where I’d intended to go to sleep. In other words, my pills would be with me, and, except for a planned trip, there would be no need to pack a bottle or medicine in my car or in my bag. Nor would I have to worry about arranging to have a cup of water to swallow my pills or whatnot at some point in the middle of the day.

Notes on allergies (part 1)

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
June 11, 2015

This is going to be a short and rather vague blog post, because I don’t remember many of the important relevant details.

But I do remember the first time I was ever told, at least as an adult, that I might be suffering from allergies. I was sitting in an examination room at a medical practice in Henderson, N.C. I can picture the man who had examined me — he was a large-framed fellow, although I can’t remember his name or whether he was a doctor, a physician’s assistant or a nurse-practitioner.

I think that I must have mumbled something about how I’d never heard of anyone developing allergies in their adulthood; the medical person replied that this kind of thing was in fact relatively common. There may have been some talk about how, as a newcomer to North Carolina, I’d noticed that there seemed to be a lot more pollen there than in my native New York. (I moved from Manhattan to Henderson in 2004.)