"The extract you got is the extract you got": Allergy Injections

Counterproductive.

Oh, it's still preferable to the symptoms I would get otherwise.

Rockist, if you don't mind me hijacking the thread temporarily....

I want to no longer be allergic to cats. It's not as much the sniffling and itching that bothers me. It's the fact that being around certain cats trigger asthma in me. If I spend a number hours in a small uncleaned space with lots of cats, I breath at a fraction of capacity for the next few days.

As you can tell, given the abundance of close ones in my life who have cats, I don't want this shit to happen anymore.

Have any of you any luck with seeing an allergist and taking care of an issue like this? What should I expect?

DB, I'm sorry if our house drove you over the edge. : \

If you can afford it/have insurance, whatever, then I'd recommend seeing a doctor about it. I know that they have extract for cat allergies. For what it's worth, when my allergist discovered that I had a cat allergy, he (or she? I've had a zillion different doctors within the same practice) advised me to avoid them and that was about it. They did ask if I lived with a cat, or spent a lot of time around cats. If I had said yes, they might have started giving me injections for it. (In fact, I forgot: I wanted to ask about that today. I have been dating someone who has a cat, and was thinking of asking to start getting shots for that as well. I haven't actually spent time at her--her father's actually--place, however. Anyway, our relationship is shakey, at best, at the moment.)

According to the book Sinus Survival, by Robert S. Ivker: "One option for allergic cat owners is to wash the cat once a month, and within three to eight months it will stop making the offending allergen in its saliva. You will have created a nonallergenic cat." That allergen sticks around for a long time, however (on walls, and so forth).

Re: hijacking the thread. . . This is a pretty purposeless thread, so hijack away. Talk about East European Cubist architecture if you want.

I have a pretty mild dog allergy, but I still have a dog- he just gets lots of baths, and I use Aller-pet, which we get from our vet. It's a liquid that you rub into their coat, which supposedly helps get rid of the allergens. Also, I wash his blankets in hot water every other week, and he's not allowed in my bedroom.

Obviously, my allergy isn't that bad, but those things might help. I don't get allergy shots- just keeping everything clean controls it well enough.