Tell me about your experiences going to/working with an allergist

So… apparently you can’t avoid them and maybe should have the shots after all…?

Well I’ll be damned. I’ve been suffering greatly for the past 3 months with these exact symptoms, along with hives. I was having an allergic reaction to a medication I had implanted in my arm. Since it was something I was dealing with with my gynecologist (she did the implant) I never got too deep in to what was going on with my esophagus (other than “this is the ducking worst”). Now I know.

It was actually that very same exposure to horses and subsequent bad allergic reaction back in the summer of 1996 that prompted me to ask the allergist the question in the first place. His answer was “no shots—avoid instead.“

I’ve done that. I haven’t been near a horse (or cat) since then.

The part where I mentioned allergic reactions getting worse each time were all prior to 1996 (which I see I was not very clear in stating in my last post). I can name just about every time I was around a cat or horse growing up, and my allergic reaction to these exposures got worse every time, culminating in nearly going into anaphylaxis in 1996.

Poison ivy is a different story (and not an animal, of course). My reaction to it has also gotten worse each time, but I haven’t had as much luck avoiding it. If I don’t wash it off immediately, I usually end up in the urgent care clinic.

:scream:
I did have them include cat / dog in my regimen - I was actually getting 3 shots at a time. Luckily for me I’ve never had anything worse than local soreness. But your tale is a good lesson in why they ask you to stick around for 15-20 minutes after the shots.

And oh yeah, on repeated exposures being worse: my son’s first reaction to peanuts was one or two hives and itchy eyes. HIs next probable exposure was 4 days of hives. His next KNOWN exposure had him feeling wretched for about a half hour then fortunately his body evicted the meal he’d just eaten. We’re lucky he didn’t go anaphylactic; we were in another city, and we never carried his EpiPens since he was 16 at that point and had never reacted to anything.

Hopefully TruCelt will pop in; she once told me a rather terrifying story of just being tested.

I don’t know how well the cat regimen may have worked. I’m rarely exposed, and when I am, I figure I’ll deal with any sniffles; handwashing and perhaps clothing changes seem to keep that at bay, so I can have the occasional bit of fur therapy. I actually was OK with cats for a while (pre-treatment): I’d get sniffly for a few days then be fine. We got one cat; that happened… then a year later we got a SECOND cat, which pushed me over the edge into redeveloping asthma.

Which, given the state of the art in treatment at the time (steroid inhalers were newfangled and rarely used), was out and out dangerous for me. Ultimately, one cat died, the other cat was rehomed, and we moved. I haven’t dared risk it since then.

We’ve had a dog around the house from time to time, usually for a couple weeks at a time. He’s a lower-shedding variety, and he hasn’t bothered me, so perhaps the shots worked (or perhaps I was less sensitive than I’d been led to believe). We also have 2 parakeets; supposedly I’m allergic to feathers but since the birds don’t voluntarily come near me, and I don’t routinely stick my head in their cage and take a big SNIFFFFFFFFF, there doesn’t seem to be a problem there either. Weirdly, I found out that I’m sensitive to guinea pigs. When one of ours was ill, I had to grab her and basically force feed the poor thing with mushed up pellets from a syringe. She didn’t appreciate it, of course, and would scramble up my front and hide under my chin, poor piggie. I was much more sniffly, and my skin there was pretty itchy. I don’t know if they even offer testing / shots for guinea pigs but I’ve never felt the need to pursue it.

One thing that frustrates me is the investment involved in pursuing shots. Not just the cost, but the time. For best results you should go in twice a week, to help build up the dose faster, and that’s a minimum of an hour each time between getting there, and waiting before and after. They won’t let you administer them at home even if you’re trained (and robby’s post is a good example just why!). And at least for me, if I missed a week, they stepped the dose down a couple notches so I lost ground.

There are sublingual drops, but they are not approved in the US, and they’re single-allergen only. Given the cocktail of allergens most shots include, it wouldn’t be feasible to do a broad-allergen treatment using these.

As a child, I had shots for years as noted. I did not, of course, appreciate them a great deal. One of my most vivid early memories, though later than the allergist visit, was throwing a fit at the pediatrician’s office when Mom took me in for a shot. I screamed, and held onto the furniture, and the doorframe as she was dragging me back. Then, for some reason, I stopped yelling, said “When I’m five, I won’t cry any more when I get my shot” - then resumed screaming. I have no idea how my mother reacted (I’m sure she was torn between smacking me and laughing). But I turned 5 a few weeks later - and never cried again.

That’s a tad frightening, on rereading. Horses are relatively easy to avoid these days (I assume that’s what threw you into anaphylaxis?) but cats are trickier. Do you have to quiz people before visiting their homes? “Do you have a cat? Have you EVER had a cat?” (cat dander being really tough to eliminate, even when the animal is gone). Is it a problem for you to sit near someone - at work or whatever - who has cats at home? Have you ever run into anyone who pooh-poohs your allergy the way some people do with food allergies?

For whatever reason, I’ve had worse reactions from horses, but as you say, they’re pretty easy to avoid.

(Usually, anyway. One of the times I was unable to avoid them was when I was in NROTC in college. I was on the drill team, and we marched right behind a bunch of riders on horseback for a parade. After a short time, I was continuously sneezing, and I couldn’t touch my face because we were in formation. I was blowing so much snot on my drill rifle that I almost dropped it.)

Cats are harder to avoid, but I don’t pet them and don’t go into people’s houses who own them. I learned that lesson over 20 years ago when my wife and I went to a party at someone’s house who owned cats. The cats were put away, but I started have a bad reaction after about 30 minutes, so we had to leave. People tend to believe you when you are continuously sneezing.

Incidentally, it took a while for me to realize that I was allergic to cats, because we didn’t own any growing up, and I was only exposed to them every once in a while. I finally figured It out when I was a teenager. Whenever I went over to a friend’s house, I got a bad allergic reaction. The epiphany came when I had to go into their basement for some reason and couldn’t find the light switch. I stepped on the edge of their cat’s litter box, flipping the contents onto my bare leg, and got an awful reaction all down my shin (like poison ivy).

I’ve never noticed any particular issue with simply being around people who have cats and horses at home. Hopefully that remains the case.