Achoum, part 1

As most of you know, my days in Bretagne weren't the happiest of ones, and on top of it, I also developed horrible year-round allergies. Funnily enough however, they would go away the minute I left Bretagne, leaving me with multiple opportunities for me to make jokes about being literally allergic to the region.

At the time, I figured I was stuck there, so I started hunting around for options, and came across the "désensibilisation" treatment.  I wrote about it already maybe six or seven years ago, but I know a lot of you didn't follow me back then, and since I've been seeing a lot of posts lately on blogs and Twitter about people suffering from hayfever and allergies, that I figured it could help a lot of folks out to re-explain it here.

In English, désensibilisation is called "Allergen-specific Immunotherapy Treatment", and in the US, it's commonly done by receiving a weekly allergy shot.  But who wants to do that?  Luckily in France, there is another, less painful, option called sublingual immunotherapy.  Which is basically a fancy word meaning you put the allergen under your tongue every morning and hold it there for a few minutes while it absorbs.

Like the shots, you need to continuing doing this for a minimum of three years in order to rid yourself of the allergy, but the good news is that you start to notice a difference almost right away. The thing about allergies is that you don't fully understand just how much they are affecting your quality of life until you don't have them anymore. Until mine were gone, I didn't even realize how much of a pain it was to be constantly sneezing and suffering from watery eyes.

Because my allergies were Bretagne-specific, I decided to stop the treatment once I moved to Paris and my symptoms had disappeared. I probably should have continued it, but at the time, I was trying to cut ties to anything that could possibly make me have to go back to my old town.  And I unfortunately find myself traveling to Bretagne quite often now for work and they are coming back.  So I started up the treatment again a few months ago. Come back in a day or two if you're an allergy-sufferer as well and you want to read more information about how the treatment works!