The war on sudafed, and the evils of trees
Basically, for those that don’t know, nonflowering trees pollinate differently than most other plants (eg: flowers): rather than insect-mediated pollination (where bugs fly flower-to-flower), a lot of trees do wind-mediated pollination — which means basically from the middle of April through the early part of June, they dump tons of pollen into the air. It gets into everything, and when it’s really heavy it coats the surface of my car with a fine yellow powder. Seriously, I wish I were kidding…
Anyway, it turns out I’m allergic to some kind of tree pollen. I don’t know what kind, but around here it doesn’t matter too much because of the diversity in people’s yards and in the local parks.
Back when I was at Purdue, I had bad days a couple times a year, where I’d be sitting in class with the window open and I’d suffer a bit… or something like that. But it was always controllable — pop a couple sudafed and the problems went away completely.
But now I’m living something like two FDA hardiness zones south of where Purdue is (West Laf is 5a/5b, Rockville’s 7a). And apparently whatever I’m allergic to is a lot more aggressive around here.
For the last two weeks I’ve been on Zyrtec, trying to fight it off. And you know, for the first week of that, it was working great, keeping the symptoms down and all. But the last couple days, the trees really kicked it into high gear and completely obliterated the effects of the Zyrtec. So when I went into work today, I felt totally miserable, and decided I needed to go get some Sudafed as a stronger anti-allergy booster. And of course, I went to the local Safeway which is about 300 feet away from where I work, because it seemed like the logical place.
The thing about Sudafed (pseudoephedrine hcl, for those in the know) is that it’s both very effective as a decongestant and useful as a chemical precursor to methamphetamine (ie: crystal meth). So with meth becoming a more significant problem in the last decade or so, pseudoephedrine is being displaced by phenylephrine.
Phenylephrine, while possibly more effective than a placebo in studies, is significantly less effective than pseudoephedrine for most people. And it doesn’t do jack freaking squat for me, in particular. And what’s worse, some stores don’t carry the real stuff at all anymore. That Safeway, which lacks a pharmacy, is unfortunately one such store.
Fortunately, I managed to find some real sudafed at the Target pharmacy, which I left work early specifically to go after (since I was pretty much incapacitated by the allergies all day and didn’t get anything significant done anyway). While I got the meds I needed (and an air filter for my room to hopefully drop the pollen count in my sleeping/living space), it was definitely more of a hassle than it should have been.
I’m coming to appreciate bees.