I usually love trees. Except every spring, when I decide I’d rather pave paradise than live with one more second of seasonal allergies.
For a few weeks each March and April, I sound and feel like my head is full of cotton. In fact, it’s stuffed full of tree pollen and, well, snot. During these weeks, I’m horrifically unproductive. It’s hard to get anything done while constantly out of breath. I’m pretty sure my coworkers are wearing headphones just so they don’t have to hear me blow my nose again.
And I know I’m not the only one suffering. So, this week in our unscientific poll at Heraldnet.com, we asked how you deal with allergies.
It seems most of you trust to the miracle of modern chemistry. A majority, 55 percent, turn to pharmaceuticals for relief. Then it was a rough tie for the second-most-popular remedy. About 13 percent of you just shut yourselves in. After all, the pollen is outside, and if you never go outside, you may find some relief. Taking local honey or natural supplements received about 12 percent of the vote. Another 12 percent opted to wash away the suffering with Neti pots or saline sprays. A minority, 8 percent went with the steamy shower or vaporizer option.
We should have offered you an “all of the above” option. Personally, that’s what I’ve been going with. In fact, if you told me that I could cure allergies by, say, standing in a tub full of eel eggs, I’d totally do it.
In the meantime, I’m going through tissues like mad and wishing that plant reproduction didn’t have to be so messy.
— Jessi Loerch, web producer; jloerch@heraldnet.com. Jessi is filling in for our regular Web Monkey, Doug, while he is on vacation. With any luck, he is actually able to breath. Doug will return next week.
For our next poll, we’d like to know what you think about a specific type of plant: Marijuana.
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