Eugene, Oregon is beautiful, it is lush and green and amazing, even in the summer it would rain at least once a day. When I was 19 going to college there I was sick all the time, or so I thought, when I came home on winter break I went to the doctor to get my “cold” checked out. “You have asthma”, he said, “you aren’t sick you have allergies”. I was given an inhaler and some allegra and a cortisone shot in the butt with the door open as people walked by, which I am still bitter about, so long as I took the allegra I never needed the inhaler and once I came home to California I didn’t need the Allegra either so I forgot all about it (except the shot :/ ).
Fast forward 10 years and I find my self in grey and rainy Ukraine, where for the first 10 days it rained at least once per day. It was cool enough to run around the city without much discomfort, it was nice. Then came Monday, the first day of kids camp. The sun had come out as so many had prayed for, the day was bright and beautiful and the field was freshly mowed. Then I sneezed. We did our declarations and then prayed, and my eyes began to itch. We began to play games and my nose began to run and my eyes began to water and itch even more. We tossed a ball around in a circle with the small kids and by the 5th round I was almost blind. Logan came over and said a prayer for me and my eyes still itched some but I could see and my sneezing stopped for a few minutes. I did my best to make it through camp and then after camp walked to the store with Sydney to find allergy medicine. The woman behind the counter thought I had a cold and kept trying to give me cold medicine, luckily the pictures on cold medicine labels are pretty standard so we could see that’s what it was. I said allergies several times before she repeated “allerhia” and brought back different medicines, there was no zyrtec (which I love) , there was some weird Claritin type thing but I went with the Loretek since I have never seen or heard of it before I thought “how often do you get the chance to take foreign drugs you can’t read the label on?”
