Sunday was what I'm starting to call an "allergy day." I've had allergies all my life, but ever since the CHF, they really do take the wind out of me.

(No pun intended.)

Last year, at some point, I started noticing that on bad allergy days, something felt like a granulation in the outer corner of my right eye - like the kind of "sleep" you'd rub out of it, except it didn't rub out. It took me a day or two back then to figure out that it was something that swelled up due to allergies and not an actual object in my eye.

This morning, I woke up about two hours too early with such a granulation, and some trouble breathing. Unlike two weeks ago, before the rains, this time my nose was running. Of course, this always freaks me out in the days of heart failure, but I weighed myself and I lost weight from yesterday despite eating a rather healthy amount of not-particularly-healthy food, so I knew I wasn't retaining fluids. I added a 24-hour Claritin-D to the daily medical regimen - I didn't like how the 12-hour one made me feel, and my doctor said he'd seen better luck with the 24-hour variety anyway.

It didn't seem to do a whole lot. I was tired all day and retained the stuffiness and breathing issues. In the evening, I finally gave in and used some Nasonex as well (yet another prescription added in the past six months), and that cleared up my nose enough to breathe freely - and so I promptly fell asleep in my chair because I was tired.

So now it's time for another round of antihistamines and another try at sleep to see if everything works better tomorrow (today?). This is what drives me nuts about all this - there are days when what should be a simple medical inconvenience just saps the strength out of the entire day, and I don't know when they'll happen.

They're fewer, and farther between, then they were before mid-September. That's good, but it's still frustrating. I get up full of plans to write, and then I just spend the day trying to get rid of the thing in my eye and take deeper breaths. I just wish I could find my Visine.