While driving home last night, I was just thinking that my allergy prescription dose from the previous night must be wearing off when Michael mentioned that his sinuses had started going whacko. He was attributing it to the change in weather.

Most of last week was very wet, with rain every day. Parts of Friday, all of Saturday, and most of Sunday were quite a bit drier, but only relatively. We had some sun breaks, and what rain there was came in very light, occasional showers. Sunday night we got the deluge.

Radical shifts in air pressure or humidity sometimes cause my sinus passages to either get tender or to close up temporarily, regardless of the pollen, mold, or spore count. And while most people living in the northern hemisphere with ordinary hay fever are free and clear by this time of year, I’m not. Pollen counts are so low as to almost be nonexistent, and fern spores are tapering off. But November is toadstool and mushroom season, which means fungus spores are just ramping up.

In addition to my usual prescription, I took a bit of over-the-counter stuff before going to bed. I awoke in the middle of the night with the sinuses in super-hyper congested mode, along with the itchy eyes. So I took another type of over-the-counter stuff and managed to go back to sleep.

This morning I broke down and raided my pseudo ephedrine supply. Can I say, by the way, I hate that meth heads and meth lab runners have turned thousands of innocent sinus-problem sufferers into suspects, forcing us to show ID, sign extra paper work granting the state, the feds, and the pharmacy companies permission to examine and share information about our purchase history of what used to be a cheap, over-the-counter nasal decongestant? Which is rationed by those same forces, now?

I’m sorry, the usual substitutions don’t work anywhere near as well for me. So at times like this, where everything above my jaw line hurts, aches, and stings, I just don’t understand how restricting law-abiding people from buying a legal medication (a practice which has had zero effect on the illegal trade of the substance that said medication can be used to manufacture) makes any sense.

Now excuse me while I pack some extra tissue into my backpack before I leave for work…