confessions of a nasal mist addict

I finished my time at Our Sisters of the Sacred Heart and was looking forward to getting away from Sister Mary Margaret and the cane she used to bang me over the head whenever I opened my smart-aleck mouth.  And I certainly wasn’t going to miss that third story attic of the old hospital the church was using as a nunnery/orphanage.  Twenty two beds and no A/C…it got pretty hot even when the breeze blew in off the Gulf of Mexico that was just a few miles away.

I was looking forward to two bunk beds in a house with central heat and air and didn’t even consider the repurcussions of loosing the salt air from that little burg in southeast Texas I was born in.  I was headed to the bright lights of the capital city.  In a way it felt like I was getting out of the Army and entering civilian life.  But my life was about to change.  Big time.

The mesquite and pecan trees of my birthplace were replaced with oak and cedar of the Texas hill country.  The breeze that blew that salt air across a flat plain now wiggled its way through the hill country and settled in a valley-like bowl of humidity laced with pollen.   So much pollen that my eyes were swollen shut making Little League a mere dream.  Such was my introduction to Mr. Perennial Allergic Rhinitis (aka: perpetual hay fever).

I got tested.  Literally and figuratively.  Over 100 little pricks up and down both arms with twenty-two positive reactions followed by twenty-two shots to confirm my allergies.  When you’re eight years old, one shot can be a real drag.  But twenty-two in the scope of a few minutes?  One more reason I’m in therapy today.  I went for shots twice a week for a year.  Keep in mind this was the early sixties and glass syringes and big needles were de riguer.  They were used hundreds of times a day and after about a week the needles began to dull.

 By now I’m nine years old and in third grade.  I had strep throat five times that year and missed enough school to be held back .  They yanked out my tonsils and the surgeon joked that he was going to use them on the back nine that afternoon.  The tonsilectomy helped, I didn’t get throat and ear infections very often but during the height of hayfever season my nose became impossible to breath through.  Then Schering-Plough invented Afrin.

I can’t remember who gave me my first fix but I do recall that someone said the steroid injections I got for those nasty flare ups in the spring were going to start causing calcium deposits in my feet.  That and a few other undesireable side effects were to be my destiny. 

I was already taking Tuss-Ornade; a red white and blue antihistamine that put me in a fog every morning. And I was still taking allergy shots twice a week; but as stoned as I was, sleep was elusive because I had to breathe through my mouth…which dried out and woke me up four or five times a night.  But the Afrin made everything okay.  Granted I now woke up every morning with a sore throat from the post-nasal drip, drip, drip but it wasn’t anything a cup of hot coffee would cure.  And the caffeine served to counter the effects of the Tuss-Ornade giving me a little buzz to get me through the morning.  At nine I had discovered the perfect cocktail of Afrin at bed time and a T-O & coffee speedball in the morning.  Here’s the kicker.

In 1964 Afrin was a prescription drug.   You can buy it over the counter today but the percentage solution is nothing compared to what I was getting, especially for my sixty something pounds.  Afrin is a cardico steroid and in prescription doses it can make you a little whacky.  It works by shrinking the capillaries and tissues it’s applied to, but after a few days those capillaries and tissues get to liking Afrin like a junkie likes his fix.  So when you don’t use it, they begin rebelling by swelling — yep, now you’re stopped up again and dry as a bone with boulder sized buggers suitable for your sling shot.

At nine I was a nasal mist addict.

I waddled through grade school half stoned out of my tiny mind, half asleep and half numb to everything that was going on around me.  Things got better as I got older, I learned to control my use of Afrin and my pollen allergies subsided after nine years of shots and the natural hormone change that occurs with puberty.  But the Wonder Years weren’t so wonderful.  Given my malaise and living with five other people in a two bedroom Korean cracker box you can imagine why I’ve got more issues than National Geographic.

I still go on the occasional bender and have continued my relationship with readily available OTC nasal nirvana’s.  NeoSynephrine is my drug of choice these days, and the generic version of Phenylephrine HCL works just fine.  Today I’m a mere few blocks from the beach in SoCal where there’s not much pollen until the Santa Anna wins blow in from the east.  That’s when I turn to my old friend and borrow a line from Jefferson Airplane: “Have another hit…of fresh air.”