The Summer of My Discombobulation

Any summer in which your mom dies is not going to be a good one, but this one came with added misery. Two weeks before she died, I came down with a bad case of the hives. Poignant that. Up until my mid-20s I was a chronic hive sufferer. My mother suffered from them most all of her life and was so suffering when I told her about my first outbreak in about 50 years. She apologized for saddling me with the discomfort…such a mom thing to do…as if it was her fault. Which I actually began to wonder about when the cause of the outbreak--after such a long dormancy--remained a mystery. Not so much her fault, really, but I did wonder if mine was a psychosomatic condition my mind had developed out of sympathy with what clearly looked like my mom’s last stand against kidney failure.
My dermatologist at first thought it was scabies, but when I answered in the negative his question about the groin area, we moved on from that line of inquiry. Then he suggested that I keep a daily food journal to try and pinpoint the cause of the almost nightly outbreak. That regime led me to a few quite usual suspects, but nothing conclusive. In exasperation I took the problem to my GP, who sent me for a blood panel. Between the blood taking and getting the lab's results, mom passed. That necessitated a trip home to New England…with a carry-on full of anti-itch powders, cremes and Benedryl. When I returned home after four days of mourning, I was dealing with a rich mucus-heavy cough that came on each morning and each evening. In her last 10 days, mom had been rushed to the hospital three times with heavy liquid build-up in her lungs that had to be medically removed. Again, hyper rational person that I am, I still couldn’t help but think that somehow my body was mimicking hers.
Who the hell am I?Three days later my doctor called with results of the blood panel, which showed that I had a sensitivity to egg whites and cow’s milk. I told him I have a cappuccino every morning and an egg twice a week. He said, “Well, you might be able to get away with that, but I wouldn't try to eat any quiche.” That would be easy…I hate quiche, and not just because I'm a real man...I just hate it. But a day later I decided to push the envelope and ate an egg sandwich for breakfast. The next morning I woke up looking as I do here: 
 Not only did it look scary but it felt even scarier. I could feel my cheeks closing in on my tongue and air pipe and went into a Zen state to stop myself from a panic brought on by the thought of my own body turning on me (the dark side of Love’s Body!). I gave myself a few hours to monitor the situation before getting in the car and driving 20 minutes to the emergency room. In about an hour-and-a-half, the swelling started to recede, and 24 hours later my face returned to normal. But it was just enough of a scare to make me change my diet instantly…cold turkey…no more grilled cheeses, 4-cheese ravioli, wine and cheese…and my cappuccinos would be served strictly with coconut milk. People asked how could I turn on a dime like that. Well, that picture of my face helped of course…as did growing up Catholic. Say what you will about it, but learning to give up goodies once a year for Lent helps build discipline for such things.
Anyway, weeks rolled into months…and despite my abstinence from most things dairy, I continued to not only be plagued by nightly attacks of the hives, but the cough as well.  It was reaching the point where I was beginning to wonder if these would be permanent aspects of the rest of my life. Exasperation drove me to measures that were, for me, extreme…a cleanse and a fast. I will spare the ugly details, except to say that the immediate results appeared promising. A day after was my best day in months…the day after that was even better, and by the subsequent Saturday I felt like a brand new me. On Sunday I took that brand new me out for a day of trouble-free yard work. By dinnertime, however, I was abloom with hives again and the cough--which I was now convinced was directly related--came back deeper and nastier than ever. Further reading on the subject revealed that eggs or milk could not have been the source because they would have been cleared out of my system weeks ago. So I swam my regular laps in the pool on Monday virtually adrift on a sea of doubt and confusion. 
Then from my vantage point in the pool, I looked up and saw two swallows nests hanging under the eaves of our house (an almost identical version of them from the previous summer is featured in the video below). I quickly recalled that on Sunday I had lifted both an extension cord and a stepladder that had been covered in bird shit, and I suddenly wondered if there might be a less than usual suspect to consider.
I dried myself off, ran up to my computer and began Googling the hell out of bird mites. Interestingly enough, the first thing I read was that bird mites are most commonly the cause of scabies…which was my dermatologist’s first guess. But these clearly weren’t scabies. My symptoms, however, did align with the dirty work of another bird mite species. Lorna then called a local bird mite specialist who told her he usually gets three calls a summer to eradicate bird mites, but this summer he had already received 25 calls. He said he’d come and treat our house for $650. Even though he said he couldn’t guarantee that the mites were the source of my problem, my growing insanity made $650 sound like a devil's bargain.
Before he arrived, per his instruction, I knocked down three swallows nests hanging from our house, each hosting dozens of swallows. I told the exterminator how we had not only been overcome with birds this season as a result of the heavy winter rains, but how their behavior had been downright bizarre. It had begun with one robin constantly rap…rap…rapping at our chamber door, but soon included doves, woodpeckers, hummingbirds, finches et al. tapping at all our windows. He told us that there was a chemical farmers used that caused birds to hallucinate, and that’s what this sounded like since we have plenty of nearby farms. With that, we went away for the day and left him to do his job of saturating our house with chemicals and hoping for the best.
The next day, my hives and cough vanished as if by magic wand, and I was back to having my cappuccino with cow's milk. All this has put a dark twist on our romance about living in our very own wildlife preserve...and I’ll surely never listen to this song quite the same again. And speaking of songs…apologies to Neil Young. I created the video below as a joint homage to Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch two years ago. Little did I know that the ominous, creepy tone would be totally appropriate for the hell to follow.