Hay Fever

Yesterday I must have sneezed over two hundred times. I’m not exaggerating, at one point I didn’t stop sneezing for about ten minutes. Afterwards my mother asked me why I was so snappy and easily angered. I snapped at her.

I don’t think anybody that doesn't have allergies can understand how frustrating it is to have allergies. They think ‘what are you complaining about, sneezing isn’t that bad!’ no it isn’t, when you only do it twice, but I can promise you that it becomes an absolute living nightmare when you do it quite a bit more. It’s exhausting. You can compare it to having a niggling cold that won’t go away for a whole season (three to four months, for those uninitiated in the season thing).

And the thing is, I haven’t had any allergies for seven years. Seven years! I thought ‘I’ll probably have outgrown it by now’ and how wrong I was. I just wish that I’d picked up some anti-histamine when I left India. There it was cheap, you didn’t need a prescription and it was available everywhere. Here I basically need to first get insured (which is expensive) then go to a doctor (which is expensive) who will then forward me to an allergy doctor (which is expensive) after which I can finally go to the pharmacy to get my drugs (which is expensive). Yes, I get the last three back, but only in a few months time. My money problems aren’t in three month’s time, they are right now.

And spring is my favourite season! It’s the season I missed most when I was away (If I had a choice, I’d live in a place where the weather constantly fluctuates between spring and summer).

To add insult to injury, all the people around me seem to be completely allergy free. They don’t even know what anti-histamine is. All, except my girlfriend, but she was an hour and a half away by train yesterday, which isn’t really a distance you can just go and travel to stop sneezing.

I just know it’s one bleedin’ plant that grows just here in Holland that I can’t stand; one plant which is trying to kill me. I’m convinced that as soon as I hit anywhere else it won’t be a problem anymore – it just grows in Holland.

Another argument against the Netherland. That makes four; the language, the assumption that all Dutch people make that they know everything better, the weather and that one plant that gives me allergies. Let’s hope it stays at four, because otherwise I might start doubting my decision to come here.