Post by OziRiS on May 20, 2013 20:05:30 GMT
I know it all too well.
My cousin (mom's sister's son) grew up in a home that had to be squeeky clean all the time. His dad was an old school military man who married his mom when she was very young. She was "forced" to stay at home and with nothing else to do, she cleaned all day long. By the time my cousin was 3 years old, he had almost every allergy known to man, the strongest of which was his extreme hay fever. It got so bad at times that he had to wear a mask during the high point of the pollen season.
When he started preschool he would come home with nasty rashes from touching plants on the playground and touching or eating foods he wasn't used to from home (mostly fruits, vegetables and foods with a high gluten content). By the time he hit kindergarten he was out of school most of the summer and had one or two sick days every week.
When his parents divorced when he was 7, it was like his mom needed to rebel against everything her husband had stood for. She toned down her cleaning and reduced the number of baths my cousin had to take per day to one or two (used to be at least two and more if he got dirty during the day - eating a jam sandwich would usually result in a 20+ min bath for my cousin when he was little). By the time my cousin was 10, my aunt had become somewhat sloppy compared to how she used to be and strangely, some of his allergies had become less powerful and some had disappeared altogether.
When my cousin was 13 he read somewhere that underexposure to certain things could cause allergy so, still being tormented by his hay fever every summer, he decided to go cold turkey. He started camping. At first it was just in the back yard in the late spring when pollen counts weren't that high yet, but as he got more and more used to it he started taking long walks in the woods at the height of the pollen season.
Long story short: He pretty much became a pollen masochist for a number of years but today, at age 28, my cousin is almost completely free of his hay fever. There's only a couple of weeks of the year where it's bad for him, but now he can at least get along with a normal dose of Benadryl instead of having to wear a mask and stay indoors for weeks on end.
My cousin (mom's sister's son) grew up in a home that had to be squeeky clean all the time. His dad was an old school military man who married his mom when she was very young. She was "forced" to stay at home and with nothing else to do, she cleaned all day long. By the time my cousin was 3 years old, he had almost every allergy known to man, the strongest of which was his extreme hay fever. It got so bad at times that he had to wear a mask during the high point of the pollen season.
When he started preschool he would come home with nasty rashes from touching plants on the playground and touching or eating foods he wasn't used to from home (mostly fruits, vegetables and foods with a high gluten content). By the time he hit kindergarten he was out of school most of the summer and had one or two sick days every week.
When his parents divorced when he was 7, it was like his mom needed to rebel against everything her husband had stood for. She toned down her cleaning and reduced the number of baths my cousin had to take per day to one or two (used to be at least two and more if he got dirty during the day - eating a jam sandwich would usually result in a 20+ min bath for my cousin when he was little). By the time my cousin was 10, my aunt had become somewhat sloppy compared to how she used to be and strangely, some of his allergies had become less powerful and some had disappeared altogether.
When my cousin was 13 he read somewhere that underexposure to certain things could cause allergy so, still being tormented by his hay fever every summer, he decided to go cold turkey. He started camping. At first it was just in the back yard in the late spring when pollen counts weren't that high yet, but as he got more and more used to it he started taking long walks in the woods at the height of the pollen season.
Long story short: He pretty much became a pollen masochist for a number of years but today, at age 28, my cousin is almost completely free of his hay fever. There's only a couple of weeks of the year where it's bad for him, but now he can at least get along with a normal dose of Benadryl instead of having to wear a mask and stay indoors for weeks on end.
