Annual spring allergies are rusting my iron constitution

I don't get sick, at least not for any length of time. I can knock out a 48-hour flu in about 12 hours and the last time I missed work for an illness was when my daughter gave me pinkeye.

My mother says when I was 3 and all the kids in the neighborhood got chicken pox, I had eight. All the other kids were covered from head to toe and I had eight little pox. I also got the mump.

But while I rarely get sick, I really whine about it when I do. This is such an occasion. But I'm not really sick, I have allergies. The really frustrating part is that I haven't always had allergies. In fact, I never had them until I was 37 years old.

It didn't happen when I moved to Ohio, but the last spring before I left northern California. I was just sitting there in my living room, minding my own business one spring evening, when I sneezed. Then I sneezed again and again and again. I felt perfectly fine, except for the sneezing.

And these were not delicate little sneezes, the kind where you're sure the sneezer is going to blow out an eardrum trying to suppress the explosion. They're loud and violent and I can fire them off in rapid succession. AAAAAAH-CHAAAAAA!! ... AAAAAAH-CHAAAAAA!!

My personal record is 15 sneezes in a minute. And they happen so quickly I can't get my hands up to cover my mouth. I spend a lot of time wiping off my computer screen. I'd like to apologize to everyone I've sneezed on the the last few years. The bad news is you're all wet, but the good news is I'm not contagious.

Then my nose starts to run and my eyes begin to itch. That first spring, I was very confused. These were clearly allergy symptoms, but I wasn't an allergy person. Allergy people are Jack Lemon as Felix Unger walking around the apartment making honking noises and spraying everything with disinfectant. I'm not like that. Like I said, I'm militantly healthy.

So I went to the doctor looking for an explanation.

"This happens to a lot of people your age," she said. (That's not the most comforting sentence in the world and I can't imagine it's the last time I'll hear a doctor say it.) "Sometimes people develop allergies over time."

She gave me a prescription and a couple of samples of other medications and sent me on my way. I had a pill, a nasal spray and some kind of inhaler.

The drugs made the allergies tolerable and in a few weeks, whatever it is that causes them quit blooming and they went away. Whatever it is that sends me into sneezing fits only happens for about three weeks in the spring. But they always come back this time of year and I'm reminded that I, too, am now an allergy person.

The stuff I got from the doctor in California lasted me through my first spring in Ohio. The next spring, for some reason, wasn't so bad. But the following year, allergies came back with a vengeance.

I went back to my stash of allergy medicine and found most of it was gone and the rest had expired in 2001. But I have discovered that one of the benefits of the deregulation of the drug industry is that you now can get over-the-counter medication that actually does something. It used to be that most stuff you could get without a prescription was more placebo than anything else. Not so any more, and now every spring I pop Claritin like Chicklets.

They do pretty much what the package tells you they're going to do. The primary benefit of these pills is stopping most of the sneezing, and they suck all of the moisture out of your head. This keeps my nose from running and my eyes from watering, but it also makes me thirsty and I think my brain is beginning to dehydrate.

I'm pretty sure your brain needs moisture. This may explain my inability to verbalize a coherent sentence and why my typing, which isn't great under ideal conditions, looks like this blog originally was written with the keyboard behind my head, Jimi Hendrix style. It didn't help that I managed to break my lawn mower in the fastest part of the growing season. I went out to mow my lawn a couple of weeks ago and, being the big he-man that I am, pulled the cord right out of it.

When it didn't start on the first pull, I gave it an extra hard tug the second time. I found myself standing there with the handle and half the cord in my hand as the mower sucked the other half of the cord back inside.

I'm not the handiest guy in the world. I was pretty sure opening the mower up and replacing the starter cord was beyond me. So I called a professional.

I borrowed a neighbor's mower that first day, but while we were waiting for a part (it's the busy time of the year in the lawn mower repair business), it continued to rain every other day and the grass continued to grow like, well, grass.

As I waited for the mower to come back with its new cord, the grass was getting taller and taller and beginning to go to seed. This was especially fun for the allergy sufferer. My house was covered on all sides by grass that was getting so tall that we were beginning to lose the dogs.

The allergy medicine I've been taking is supposed to last 12 hours and 10 pills costs about 12 bucks. So I've been trying to only take one a day, but when they wear off in the middle of the night, all of the moisture rushes back into my head and I wake up sniffling and sneezing.

It'll be over soon and I can go back to having an iron constitution. See what I mean about the whining? Maybe it's a good thing I don't get sick more often. I'd be insufferable.

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