The Dead Don’t Sneeze

Christian P. Harrington

“Ha, wow, you do have a lot of allergies,” the doctor said, looking over the results of my skin test. Because this man spent a lot of time with the allergy-stricken, the genuine surprise in his voice hit hard. Still, he wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know.

My sinuses had been under attack since high school and, for whatever reason, they got worse in college. I wondered why. Was it the pollen? Bad sinus cavities? A deviated septum? My jaundice as a newborn? Sixth grade English, when I spent the year sitting with my back against a radiator? All of it? None of it?

Once or twice a year I would visit an ear, nose, and throat specialist in search of a cure for my sinus situation. There were times during my worst congestion episodes when I hoped the doctor would perform a quick examination, look right into my eyes, and just say it: “Nothing can be done for these sinuses. Not here, not now, not anywhere, not ever. Your search ends today.” To my dismay, they just encouraged me to stick with the nasal sprays, buy some dust mite pillow covers, and keep up the fight. That would pacify me for a few months until the thoughts started swirling again.

I had grand visions about the kind of man I would be if I had perfect sinuses. That me was happy. He was popular. He wrote novels. He lived on the side of a cliff in Norway with a circus of puffins.

Shortly after college I took the surgical route and had my adenoids removed. Adenoids are the glands at the back of the throat with an as-yet-unknown purpose, like the appendix. Supposedly my adenoids were abnormally large and therefore may have been contributing to my postnasal drip. Now that I don’t have adenoids, I’m bracing for scientists to discover that healthy adenoids are essential in preventing dementia.

“Do you have any ideas, other than playing in traffic?” I asked my new doc.

Sensing this was an attempt at levity, he forced out a short, exaggerated laugh. That worked for me. Still, as much as I delighted in his awkward chairside manner, I prepared for the usual suggestions: neti pot, steroid nasal spray, meditation, nihilism.

“You would be an excellent candidate for allergy shots,” he said.

I agreed to them immediately.

“Do you know what they are?” he asked.

“Not a clue,” I responded.

He explained that shots were a highly effective form of immunotherapy, a word I didn’t know but liked the sound of. Apparently the lab could make customized bottles of my specific allergens. If I proceeded according to the schedule—starting with weekly shots—I could be on my way to allergen freedom within a few years. This man had a real plan.

And so I began taking four different shots. For the first time in years, the puffin circus didn’t seem like a wild fantasy.

While I perceived improvements with my seasonal allergy symptoms after starting the shots, I didn’t face a real test until two years into the program when I took a trip to Philadelphia to see my college friends, Chris and Marge. They had been inviting me to visit their new townhouse and I had been successfully entertaining the idea while also pushing it off. Eventually it was time to bite the bullet and go before they took it personally. I would have loved to stay with them, of course, but they owned a domestic shorthair cat named Fennel.

Publicly, I lament my cat allergy. The sensitivity has prevented me from staying with friends and family who have cats. Privately, I am grateful for the condition since it has prevented me from staying with friends and family who have cats. There is no easier way to decline an invitation than with the reply, “Oh, but don’t you have a cat?”

When I was little, a clock started ticking in my head as soon as I walked through the door of a cat-infested house. I knew I only had a few minutes before the wheezing, sneezing, and eye-watering began. Worried about the potential of an allergy disaster and hesitant to ask that Chris and Marge find other housing arrangements for Fennel, I rented a nearby, cat-free apartment with a friend. Still, that didn’t mean I could avoid the cat all weekend.

We met up at their house to watch a soccer match over breakfast. I prayed that the cat shots had been building up a tolerance.

Fennel, my adversary, was a handsome cat with an athletic build covered in thick, dark fluff that I would pet under different genetic circumstances. Even though cats had kicked up some allergy attacks in my day, I appreciated that, with the cat, I could see my enemy. Most of my allergies were undetectably floating in the air or crawling around my pillows at microscopic sizes. I couldn’t avoid trees and flowers, but not once did I step outside the house only to get hit by an invisible wave of cats.

As soon as I entered his territory, Fennel sauntered in my direction. Allergy aside, the approach of a feline had become unnerving ever since I read about a cat in a retirement home who slept on the laps of those about to die. I remained standing.

Fennel smelled my pants for a bit. Unimpressed, he turned around and walked back to the kitchen. I kept waiting for some sniffles, some eye discomfort. But there was nothing. I felt fine. Of course, I couldn’t say that to my friends. For years I had made a big show about saying how much I would love to stay with them, if not for the cat. I had to play it up in case Chris noticed my comfort.

“You doing okay with the cat?” Chris asked. 

I did my best to muster up a mild cough.

“Yeah, not too bad so far,” I replied.

For the rest of the morning I feigned some chest discomfort. Once the game ended I made a point of saying we should get back to the rental apartment before my chest tightened up more than it already had. Chris could never know the truth. The truth was I felt great. As far as my nose was concerned, there was no cat in the house. The immunotherapy was working.

On the heels of my victory with Fennel, I showed up to my next allergy shots appointment with no expectation of disaster. It didn’t matter that I was teaching two sections of Introduction to College Writing later in the day because, in my mind, there was no chance of a reaction. I was on track to becoming an immunotherapy success story. I pictured myself sitting in the waiting room one day, giving a gawking fellow patient a nod to say, yes, that is me pictured with a handful of kittens on the cover of Allergy Magazine.

The appointment couldn’t have started any better. My favorite nurse was administering the shots. Her quick-strike technique made the process nearly painless. Everything was fine, until the final shot: cat and dog. Only through the marvels of modern medicine could cat and dog exist in the same bottle without a chemical reaction.

I felt just fine when the needle punctured the skin. Then it hit. I had been poisoned.

I didn’t have anything to compare it to, but it was a poisoning all right. I suddenly knew how all those steel magnates in British murder mysteries felt when they were sipping on Earl Grey one second and choking to death on top of their crosswords the next.

I couldn’t feel my limbs but somehow I managed to jump off the stool and bolt to the nearest toilet. My body was in survival mode—a mode I was pleasantly surprised to discover it had.

As I turned the corner toward the bathroom, I heard the injection nurse—likely still noting my appointment on the computer—ask for my parking ticket. I was long gone by the time she would have spun back around. Perhaps she thought I was so bored by her commentary that I decided the three-dollar parking validation stamp wasn’t worth it. For a part-time teacher in grad school to turn his nose up at a validation of any kind, something had to be very wrong. And it was.

I barged into the bathroom without knocking—very unusual for me—and immediately began throwing up. Luckily, the only thing I consumed before the appointment was ginger ale. I wondered if that was my mistake. I tried to think back if my wise grandmother had ever said something along the lines of, “Never mix ginger ale with the cat protein!”

Between the dry heaving and the sweating and the chest tightening, I felt pretty uncomfortable. Then the door creaked open. Apparently I had forgotten to lock the door—also very unusual for me. It was another nurse. She lifted me off the floor and escorted me into the back room. I thanked her with a polite “grraammuff.” She dumped me into a chair in the first open room and handed me a small bucket to collect my ginger drool.

Sure, I could hardly breathe and mucus was pouring out of every opening in my face, but the chair was comfortable, and everyone likes attention.

I began to worry when a Dr. Wilson entered the room. My eyes were puffy, but I was pretty sure I had never seen her before. I wondered if she was the doctor for mercy kills. Or, maybe she was the fixer. Any second she’d shout out, “Mitch, you take his car and drive it in the pond! Debbie, grab his phone and drop it in the woods! Carol. . . draft a suicide note.” Nothing like that. She just stood there, calmly analyzing me. One nurse handed her my chart as another clipped a blood pressure monitor on my finger. I wasn’t sure how the monitor would address the problem of my collapsing lungs, but it was a start. Go, team, go.

Dr. Wilson made the call for an EpiPen. “We’re going to inject the epinephrine into your thigh, okay? Remove your pants.” I was too busy trying not to sweat so much in front of all these women I barely knew to ask for a fattier location. I had never used an EpiPen. I didn’t even own one. I was only familiar with the device because my mother kept one in her purse due to a bad shellfish allergy. I told people I had a deadly shellfish allergy like her. I even convinced myself of it, to a point. In reality I just didn’t want to eat lobster. And I didn’t want to answer questions about it. If given the opportunity, people in New England will jump at the chance to persuade you that lobster rolls can change your life.

I gave consent with a nod and the nurse jabbed my thigh. Then we waited. The nurses watched me very closely, like my nieces standing over the tiny sponge in the bath, waiting for it to explode into a modestly sized dinosaur. In my case it was the reverse. We were all hoping to see a comically swollen monster shrink.

Despite a slight decrease in facial puffiness (according to them), my stomach had taken on a firetruck red tint. This compelled the doctor to call for a second shot. Now I began to worry that epinephrine was the one thing to which my body was completely immune. What came after epinephrine? Did we have something after epinephrine? We did, right, team?

I started to consider that missing my afternoon classes was a real possibility. Maybe the great actors, like Kelsey Grammer, could arrive at a set wasted and still deliver a solid performance, but this was no hangover. The cat protein had done a number on me that made gin seem like an espresso. I could have settled for the nasal sprays and the neti pot, but no, I needed the latest in immunotherapy magic.

In my defense, it’s not like I didn’t try everything else first. Prior to the shots, I had talked myself into thinking that I could cure the allergies on my own. This led to an attempted diet change. A failed attempt. Switching to raw foods triggered the most absurd side effect of my bad allergies: oral allergy syndrome (OAS). As I understand it, OAS occurs because proteins in certain fruits and vegetables look like pollen proteins, and my body is too dumb to tell the difference. But if you thought OAS would make me avoid eating certain fruits and vegetables as a child, you would be wrong. I didn’t know OAS was a thing. I figured there was some unspoken agreement among the people of the world that we would all pretend strawberries were delicious and definitely didn’t make our tongues itch.

And then there were carrots. I ate plenty of carrots as a child. Like most children, I received very little credit for it. But unlike most children, when I ate carrots, my mouth went dry and my throat became scratchy. It was as if the carrots had been coated with sandpaper on the trip from bowl to mouth. For that reason, I didn’t like carrots, but they were good for the eyes, according to my grandmother. As legend has it, her brother tried to escape Y2K by moving to a carrot farm in Colorado. He ate so many carrots that he turned orange. Carrots were in our blood, or so I thought.

According to the articles I read online, cooking or microwaving a food would change the protein just enough to fool my immune system’s defenses. That’s fine, but only a psychopath microwaves an apple. In other words, the diet was a no-go. I wanted to put apple slices on my salad without the help of electromagnetic radiation. I wanted to eat my salads like a damn man.

Thanks to those foolish produce dreams, I now sat shirtless in a room of concerned medical professionals. And good thing, too. What better place to have an allergy attack than in an allergist’s office? Still, I had to contemplate the poor optics of my death if my condition deteriorated. When somebody dies from an allergic reaction in a classroom or a restaurant, that’s tragic. When a man dies from an allergy shot that he took to boost his immunity to said allergy, it’s somehow less so. I decided that I would want the papers to omit the specific substance and list it simply as an “overdose.”

If forced to find a silver lining in the sudden death, I imagined that there were no allergies in the next life. Even if there were no next life, my battle with allergies would be over all the same. The dead don’t sneeze.

Luckily, the second dose of epinephrine turned the momentum in my body’s favor. My lung capacity was increasing. Unfortunately for the nurses, after ten minutes I could talk with ease.

I felt pretty good about my progress until I observed the faces of the remaining nurses. They were looking at me with the expression of someone who has just noticed a Band-Aid in their soup. Knowing they were too polite to say anything, I asked if one of them could kindly retrieve my phone from the waiting room.

Before I could open the camera app, one of the nurses swiveled around in her chair to say, “You’re looking much better.” Nice of her, I thought. I turned the camera to selfie mode and snapped a picture, expecting to find some inflammation but a visual that resembled, well, me. Instead, I saw a stranger. My face looked like it had just come out of major surgery performed in a wasp’s nest.

If this was the “better” version, I wish I had taken one at its worst. There was no way my mom could be mad I was two hours late returning her car after she saw my mangled face. I fired off the picture to family and friends. I was touched to receive texts like, “Jesus! You look awful! What happened to you?!” They really cared.

Before leaving, that same nurse asked if I had deviated at all from my usual routine. I said I had not. “In fact, I just spent a weekend with a cat and didn’t feel a thing,” I replied with some attitude. The nurse looked up from her files. “Well, sometimes that kind of exposure to an allergen can affect the shots,” she said. Um, what? If true, that meant that the successful defense against an actual cat had made me weaker to the small dose of synthetic cat? It was, on its face, absurd. Why should I be immune to a real cat, and yet, deathly allergic to a test tube cat? Convinced there was no sensible answer, I kept the question to myself.

Dr. Wilson gave me the final exam. Satisfied with the color of my stomach and the size of my eyelids, she gave me the go-ahead to leave. I was exiting the parking lot a mere two hours after I had walked into the building.

I would not die from a voluntary allergy injection. At least, not that day.

A few hours later, I delivered something less than my best teaching performance. Wanting to show my students what I had been through in the hopes they’d forgive my lackluster lesson, I pulled up the post-anaphylaxis selfie. That was a mistake. They erupted in laughter. While I didn’t know it at the time, some even snapped pictures of the screen. I would learn this the following semester when a student mentioned seeing a picture of me after I got stung by a bee in the face.

My body exhausted and my mind buzzing with epinephrine’s caffeine-like kick, I could do nothing but stand at the front of the class as they laughed at my face, to my face.

The experience didn’t stop me from taking allergy shots. Thankfully, nothing remotely as dramatic has happened during the dozens of appointments since. The only change is that I might scrunch my toes a bit harder every time the last needle pierces the skin. It’s not ideal, but it’s a moment of anxiety I am willing to accept. I think the shots are helping. And I’m desperate for help. At the very least, I learned a valuable lesson: don’t get cocky just because you had one good weekend with a real cat.

Christian P. Harrington is a writer and teacher in the Boston area. After a brief public relations career in Los Angeles, he returned east to write material outside the press release genre. He holds an MFA from Emerson College in Creative Writing. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Hippocampus, Pangyrus, The Lowestoft Chronicle, and Entropy.