I Don't Make These Things Up

On my birthday, I started the day being given a beautiful bouquet of wildflowers by my morning attendant. Maria’s a wonderfully sweet woman, originally from Mexico, and she accompanied the flowers with a Mexican birthday song. We put the bouquet in a vase and although flowers normally make me wheeze (damned asthma), these didn’t. What they did seem to do was make my sinuses… er… go into overproduction. Niagara Falls down the back of my throat. Love that post-nasal drip. So I asked my mother if they could come live with her and I’d visit them. I did take a picture of them before they left my house:




Nice, eh? (please ignore the clutter. I'm thinking about cleaning)

The next day, when I called my mother, she’d developed Niagara symptoms, along with a set of eyes that looked as if she’d been crying for weeks. After some discussion, we hit upon the flowers as likely culprits (neither of us had been up long, it took a while) and out they went.

Later that day, I wondered idly what ragweed looked like. Click here.

Feel free to laugh.

Update: it's been brought to my attention by people more horticulturally inclined than I that this is likely not ragweed, but goldenrod. They seem to look alike. Apparently, I am allergic to that, too.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Farber’s Disease: Could Your Child’s Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis Be Misdiagnosed?

Image
Joint inflammation or contractures. Nodules (small lumps under the skin or in other tissues). A weakened or hoarse voice. Children with these symptoms may have been diagnosed with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) or other types of juvenile arthritis . But do they actually have JIA or do they have Farber’s disease? An equine digression When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. This is an adage in the medical world that encourages doctors to not wander off exploring rare and esoteric reasons for a patient’s symptoms. Because most of the time, that hoof beat of a rash likely isn’t the plague, the joint pain more likely a type of arthritis than the bends (especially if the person has never scuba dived) and you get the picture. But once in a while, it actually is a zebra. And even if it’s first identified as a horse, eventually, the stripes come through. It took five years of my parents running around to different doctors before one finally recognized that I had
Read more

13 Things to Know for Rheumatoid Arthritis Newbies + Facebook Live

Image
Getting a diagnosis of any type of chronic illness can throw you for loop. There is so much to know and you have so little energy. My new slideshow for HealthCentral collects 13 things you need to know as an RA newbie : "Receiving a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is a moment of strange duality. On one hand, you may be relieved to finally have answers for the symptoms you’ve been experiencing. On the other, it can be incredibly overwhelming to find out you have a chronic illness. Wrapping your head around all the new factors RA brings into your life is a long-term process. Here are some of the things you need to know." See the slideshow on HealthCentral . And in case you missed it, here is the Facebook Live I did yesterday talking about this topic:   
Read more