Katie Phelps

I am allergic to a lot of strange things. When I was younger, I didn’t have any allergies. But since the summer of 2004, I have discovered more allergies than I ever could images I could have. The way I found out about my allergies was always bizarre too. My first experience was with Tide the laundry detergent. I was working at the time at Target as a cashier. One day while I was helping a customer checkout, they had a box of powder tide. As I passed the box across the scanner it slipped out of my hand and POOF, Tide everywhere — in the air, on the scanner, on the floor, on my clothes — everywhere. At the time I didn’t think much about it, except my arms were a little bit itchy. I cleaned up the tide around my lane and went to the bathroom to wash my arms. Finished work that day and went home. The next morning, I woke up and my legs were itching like crazy. I looked down at them and realized my legs were completely covered in hives the size of pieces of bread (and probably raised off my legs that think too). They were huge and horribly itchy. My mom promptly took me to the InstaCare where I had my first experience with ephinephrine (at least I think that it what they gave me). It was horrible and I never want to have to have that again. For the next 3 days, we couldn’t get the hives to go away and I will miserable. The only thing we could link it to, was the tide. Since that one experience I have had so many strange unexplainable allergy experiences. And today I had another one. I was just sitting at work and began to get more and more itchy as the day went on. Then came the hives. They weren’t too bad today, but you could see them. Right after I got the things done that I needed to and knew I had my 40 hours I came home and took some Benadryl (it always works amazing miracles). It basically wipes me out though. I slept through most of the Jazz game this evening. Good thing they won. Stay tuned for my weird eye allergy story.