:-6
Hello sneezers, here's another, randall,
I hope you don't mind my adding two bits to the thread.
I have never know a life ( I'm 74 now) without it.
My Grandmother swore I was born (at home of course in those days) with eczema - "present" is beside her name on my birth certificate but even twenty years later my mother was too embarrassed to tell me that it meant her mother was present at my birth?????
Anyway, I can remember the itching and scratching up into my teens but in meantime, asthma had hit me about the age of two.
Visiting a farm with my grandmother about the age of four I was wise enough to climb onto a beehive and knocked it over - the bees were not very pleased.
As it was mid summer I was only wearing a thin short sleeved shirt and thin short trousers with ankle socks so they had plenty of area of skin to ge their stings into.
It took them hours to pick out all the stings - well into the night - call a doctor? Well. doctors cost 7/6p and anyway nobody called out a doctor for bee stings.
In my early teen when I was beginning to take my health into my own hands I managed to get a series of tests for allergy.
They did both arms, about a dozen on each all at once (Those were the days my friend) My mother fainted at the sight of the blood.
A year or two later my local doctor ( they really did not take it very seriously in the 1930's - 1940's) sent away for tests to do himself - the pollens of many grasses, if I remember right.
He administered them and put me into the waiting room for to "develop" whilst he saw the other patients. I think he had forgotten me - by the time he remembered me I had a XXXX attack of asthma and he couldn't stick a syringe of ANDRENALINE into me fast enough.
He received a big shock and told my father so. SO my father bawled me out for not telling HIM - to me it was just another incident in my long history of many illnesses.
About the second year of my engineering apprenticeship I had a terribly itchy face one Saturday night - so bad that I had to sleep ON my hands and arms to keep myself from tearing at my face.
"OH MY GOD!" was my mother's reaction when she came into my bedroom the next morning - My face was so red and swollen that my forehead hung down over my eyes and my chin started about the middle of my chest.
Eventually I saw a doctor and he blamed diesel oil allergy and I was off work for about three months before my face and head got back to normal.
The treatment? Bathe with oatmeal soaked in warm water - there was nothing else. The fluid that oozed out as a clear liquid turned bright yellow upon drying in to a hard cracking scab.
It never came back.
In Hong Kong I attended the Baptist Hospital and found American doctors were far more interested in asthma, allergies and a lot of other things. They said that I was allergic to so many thing that the best thing was just to treat the symptoms with antihistamines - a new discovery!
Britain was so far behind the times that about the age of fourteen my mother paid a considerable sum of money - for those days - for me to see a specialist in Queens Road in Aberdeen where all the specialists lived - a bit like Harley Street, in London.
I shall never forget his remarks after a long consultation.
"It's uncomfortable and a nuisance but it's not fatal you know."
The past month I have returned to the bad old days of heavy, violent sneezing (I blame my wife's insistence that I "Must do something with that garden") and then my face swole up and my left eyelids got to about three times there normal thickness and the eye puffed out like a ping pong ball - closed.
As is often the case, my own doctor was not only on holiday but so was my pharmacist and optician.
I had to see a standby doctor at "A & E" who insisted that I had a slight infection of the eye and he would give me some antibiotic eye drops. I remonstrated with him that was antihistamine I needed but all to no avail.
The pharmacist's locum also insisted that the Doctor was always right and that was all that was wrong with my eye.
I told her I had seventy years experience of these conditions and over the years many doctors of many nationalities have told me that people who suffer chronic illnesses all of their lives become experts in that field and usually the doctor asks them what they want.
I eventually saw the opticians locum, a very nice young lady of great understanding who listened to my long history of allergy and eye problems as |I had nearly lost my left eye in 1962 because an allergic reaction had cut off the blood supply to that eye.
Somewhat mollified by her intense examination, as we also have a history of glaucoma in the family, I went home to wait for my own doctor's return from holiday.
I received the surprise of my life when on the Monday evening of the next week he telephoned me and, without preamble, asked, "What is you want from us?"I told him and he told me that he would have not given me the treatment I had been given and that there would be a prescription in the pharmacy the next day.
And there was. It was not a miraculous cure, they rarely are, but at last I could see out of both eyes and although they are both still slightly swollen it does not prevent me from writing.
That, I don't think I could stand. My father was blind for several years before he died at ninety. I really felt deep sorrow for him as his whole life was fishing, his garden and the bowling green.
So fellow allergists. Stick to your guns and don't be afraid to tell a doctor he doesn't know what he is talking about when he hasn't experienced it himself.
Even in "Dr Findlay's Casebook." Dr Findlay came in and blurted out, "That man's insufferable. He thinks he knows more about TB than I do."
"But he does," interjected Dr Cameron. "Chronic suffers are always experts in their own bodies."
God Bless All.
randall
