For the first time in almost 40 years I am allergy free.  I never thought that it would happen, but if it’s happened to me hopefully it can happen for some of you. I suffered from terrible allergies and respiratory ailments for most of my childhood and some of my adult life.  Spring and fall meant hay fever and asthma.  Misery even with medicine.  Grass, pollen, cats, dogs, hay, leaves, flowers and almost anything else found in nature from the month of April until the first fall frost brought distress and discomfort.

It all started when I was in first grade when my family lived in one of the five boroughs that make up New York City.  Terrible allergies, bloody nose attacks, wheezing.  My mom and I would take the subway once a week to an allergist who would give me 10 shots in each arm that were supposed to alleviate my symptoms.  I guess these shots worked because I didn’t really have any major incidents while we lived in the city.

Things got kicked up a notch when we moved to the suburbs.  I kept up my injection regimen and was releived when my 20 weekly shots became 10, and then just one, but my symptoms grew worse.  Occasional wheezing became full-blown, gasping-for-air asthma, and during my years in fourth through sixth grades I missed a ton of school and was hospitalized twice for respiratory-related issues.

I had pneumonia twice, spent time in an oxygen tent and wearing an oxygen mask.  I had all kinds of pills and potions.  There was one medicine that I was forced to take that was particularly onerous.  It was a clear, innocent looking and made me barf almost every time I swallowed it.  I don’t remember what it was supposed to help me with, but suffice to say it didn’t do its stuff.   The doctor suggested that I mix it with tomato juice to mask the taste, but all this did was make me develop an aversion to tomato juice.

Just like Randle McMurphy I devised ways to avoid taking this crap.  I’d tell my mom I had to take it into the bathroom just in case I “ralphed,” only to dump this poison in the toilet.  Finally I came clean and flat out told my parents that I wasn’t going to take this “medicine” any more.

I think had the first generation of asthma inhalers.  It was this little whistle-looking think and I would take a capsule filled with a powder, place it into the inhaler, slide a button up and down which put a little hole in the capsule and then breathe it in.  It made a sound like one of those whizzer rings and filled my mouth with what felt like baby powder.

But I kept getting asthma attacks and my allergies were getting worse.

Thankfully, my parents let me be a normal kid.  They let me play every sport I wanted to, and I excelled while always respecting the need to have my meds with me at all times.  All of my coaches and friends were great, and supportive, and helped me get through the tough stuff.  I learned how to deal with some hardship, and this was the one positive lesson I learned from being a sick kid.

I had food allergies.  Peanuts and peanut butter, chocolate, cola, mustard and cheese.  Oh I still snuck tastes here and there, but everyone knew my plight and had their eyes on me.

In junior high my allergies subsided a bit, but my asthma was still a mother.  Out of nowhere I’d get whacked with asthma attacks; awakened in the middle of the night feeling like there wasn’t any oxygen in my room, in the locker room before a freshman football game putting on my pads, in Spanish class, out at the movies. 

And then there were the bad ones and the midnight trips to the local doctor or the hospital emergency room. I would get a series of adrenaline shots that would on one hand jack me up, and clear out my lungs but would also knock me out so I would sleep for almost 24 hours.

My freshman year was pretty bad, but I really had a good three years in high school and didn’t lose any real time to my Achilles’ lungs.  Sports were great, school was great and I thought I turned the corner.  I was taking some new meds – including a new inhaler – and felt I had this garbage under control.

Then I went to college and the first semester of my freshman year was asthma, a lung infection and walking pneumonia.  It’s hard trying to play college football when your lungs aren’t cooperating.  It was hard enough just walking to class.  So my sports life and my academics took a real nose-dive.  To say I was discouraged would be an understatement.

However, I wouldn’t throw in the towel.  I got better and fought back.  Got back on the football field and in the classroom.  After this first year in college I never had any really bad incidents, but my allergies and asthma settled into a constant, less-severe routine.

Around the time I was 24-years old I decided to stop relying on my regular asthma medicine to see just what I could and couldn’t do.  I found that I didn’t need to be dependent on these meds everyday.  I still needed to use my inhaler from time to time, but I didn’t need these puffs before everything that I did.

My allergies have been pretty bad for most of the past 20 years despite the fact that I tried a ton of different meds.  Claritin, Allegra, and all other stuff that I can't remember the names of.  Or is it “the names of which I can’t remember?”  Anyway…

But a strange thing happened a few springs ago, in that my usual itchy eyes, runny nose, rashy-ness, didn’t seem to be as itchy, runny, rashy.  Simple remedies like eye drops and over-the-counter allergy remedies provided relief.

And a stranger thing is happening right now as I type this and as you’re reading it.  I am not experiencing a single allergy symptom and I am not taking a single allergy medicine.  People all around me are complaining about the pollen and the grass and all that jazz, and I don’t feel a thing. 

In a perverse, Tarantino-version of Three Gifts of the Magi, my wife is suffering from asthma and allergies.  She’s never sick, has never had allergies and has always been worried about me.  And now she’s the one with the pills and the inhalers, leaving a trail of balled up tissues wherever she goes.  I’m fine.

I’m really freaking happy...not that she’s suffering from allergies, but that I’m not.

Now it would be really easy for me to chalk all of this up to my healthy lifestyle and regimen of fish oil capsules and whey protein.  Or to say that swimming and avoiding all foods that have a diphthong in their names.  Or to come up with some phony-baloney “program” that I could sell to people. 

But none of this is true.  Hell, I eat peanut butter almost everyday, and don't avoid any foods.

But the bottom line is that sometimes good stuff happens, and not always for a reason.  Maybe there are allergy gods who realized that I had suffered for long enough and that now it’s my time to breathe easy.  Frankly, I don’t give a damn.  I’m just glad that I can go outside and run and drive my car with the sunroof open and not feel like I have 6 pounds of sand in my eyes and 20 pounds of mayo in my nasal passages.

And so my former fellow allergy sufferers have faith.  Hang in there and know that someday there’s a chance that you’ll beat this thing.  I never thought it would happen to me, but it has.  So stay strong, your day will come.

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written by Vince Marinello, May 10, 2007

Great story, a lot of which I wasn't even aware of at the time, but none the less true.