My new COBRA insurance card came in yesterday, and so I called to book an appointment with an ENT so that I could get some more montelukast before the final bits of my stash from last year ran out. At the doctor’s office, I learned something that is obvious in retrospect, although it surprised me at the time.
I had been planning on getting a full suite of allergy tests, so that I could figure out what it is I’m allergic to here in western North Carolina that clearly isn’t back in Louisiana. My strong suspicion is that the main culprit is dogwood, a tree we don’t really have where I’m from, but which is utterly ubiquitous here. Nevertheless, the doctor convinced me that getting tested would be a waste of time and money.
Why? Because I’m not planning on staying here long term. The tests are only really useful if you plan on following them up with shots to overcome your allergic reactions, which is usually a three- to five-year process. It’s the sort of thing you do when you’re settling down somewhere for a long time, not when you’re thinking about leaving on any sort of short- to medium-term time horizon.
And I definitely am; while I really love the weather here, and will of course miss the people when I leave, I don’t think that Lenoir is my “forever” home. It’s not Louisiana either, for that matter. I’m not sure where it is, to be honest, although my current leanings are in the Colorado/Wyoming area more than staying in the South.
The other key discovery from Dr. de Neef (pronounced duh naïf, as it’s Dutch) was that they only test for allergens in the immediate area. This was the thing that seemed so obvious in retrospect; of course there are hundreds, thousands of potential allergens, and so you’d minimize the testing to things that people are most likely to encounter. Moving exposes you to a completely different sets of plants and molds trying to have sex with your sinuses, which your body may or may not take a dislike to, and a completely new battery of tests.
So: montelukast it is, for the time being, until I figure out what the hell it is I’m doing long term. And one more thing popped off of the adulting queue.