All hail the Neti pot!

Sometimes people ask me how my husband feels about all the personal stuff I include in this column, especially personal stuff about him. My response is that I never write about anything regarding him or our kids without talking to him first, and honestly, it’s not all that personal.

Talking about his annoying blanket-smoothing rituals as he gets into bed or his extreme rule-following tendencies doesn’t bother him in the least. In fact, he thinks he comes out looking great!

Before embarking on today’s topic, however, we talked things over in depth, because this is much more personal.

A little back story: My husband has had asthma his entire life. When we first met in college, he used over-the-counter Primatene Mist to calm an asthma attack, and I didn’t think much of it. But I’d had a childhood friend who had asthma — the only other person I’d ever known with it — and in my kid-tinged memory, I thought she was on the verge of death many times.

So I encouraged my then-boyfriend to talk to a doctor and get a prescription for a better medicine. Albuterol became his go-to cure.

As time went on and asthma medicines improved, he adjusted his routine and added Advair, an inhaled steroid, to the recipe. This was for maintenance and was meant to keep him from needing Albuterol as often.

As allergy medicines evolved, my husband started including them in his repertoire. Claritin, Flonase, Allegra and Zyrtec all had various roles in helping him keep from sneezing, dripping and wheezing.

Every year, a couple of weeks into the peak of allergy season, my husband would start to feel emotionally unbalanced. He became irritable, short-tempered and quite depressed. We would discuss issues at work or other life events and tell ourselves he was just stressed out. He wondered if he was having a mid-life crisis, and we joked about making an appointment with a Corvette dealer.

Somehow it finally dawned on me that he might be experiencing mood-altering side-effects from his medicines. A quick hunt around the Internet convinced me there was a good chance the meds were making him crazy. (Regrettably, I can’t remember which sites I checked, but many medical sites and patient forums discussed the possible mood swings associated with allergy drugs.)

Nervousness, anxiety, trouble sleeping and a touch of crazy made for a difficult partner. The kids and I did a lot of tiptoeing around to make sure we didn’t get on his short, raw nerves. Lest you think I’m picking on him, here’s what he says about those dark days: “She’s not picking on me. I didn’t want to be around me either.”

When I discovered that many other patients complained of all these side-effects and my husband realized he wasn’t going insane, we were both very relieved. Strangely, we had to keep rediscovering it each allergy season because we’d forget that we’d already figured this out.

Now, what to do.

Note: This seems like a good time to say that this is merely my husband’s story and not meant to be used as medical advice.

His first reaction was to stop all drugs immediately, with the notion that he would prefer dripping and wheezing to feeling depressed and irritable. Within a few days, his mood would be greatly improved, and he was thrilled with the transformation.

Of course, the allergy and asthma problems moved to the forefront, and my husband would have to ease back into the medicines to quell the breathing problems. And repeat, about three more times: Anxiety, etc., would build, medicines would be stopped, mood would improve, asthma and allergy troubles would necessitate drugs, and the cycle continued.

About three months ago — the beginning of allergy season — we decided to really focus on a solution. After switching around from one allergy medicine to another, my husband wanted to see if there was a holistic approach to minimize allergy symptoms.

I scoured the Internet and found some very easy tips that seemed worth trying: simple things to minimize pollen’s impact like driving with your windows up and air conditioning on; drinking green tea with local honey; keeping your pillow under your blankets during the day; running an air filter in your bedroom; showering every night to get the pollen off your hair; and irrigating your nasal passages with a Neti pot (insert chorus of angels here).

Simply explained, a Neti pot is like a mini teapot that you use to pour a mild saline solution up one nostril, until it runs out the other nostril. It’s a weird sensation, but you get used to it. We got his pot — a ceramic design that looks cute sitting on our bathroom counter — at the Davis Food Co-op, where they also sell a saline mixture that is gentle and pH-balanced.

Ooh, does my husband love his Neti pot! He uses it religiously, morning and night. He also bought a plastic one for traveling, which came in very handy while on our recent trip to Santa Fe, N.M., during the wildfires. The smoky air there normally would have brought on all kinds of respiratory problems that were kept at bay with his beloved nose teapot.

Please realize that I’m not claiming to be a doctor or pharmacist. Of course, this story should not be used by anybody as a call to drop all allergy and asthma drugs. Everybody has different body chemistry and tolerance for medicines.

But for my husband, the combination of pollen avoidance and nasal rinsing has been just the ticket. His sinus passages and his mind are clear, and we are grateful to his little ceramic nose pot.

— Tanya Perez is an associate editor at The Enterprise. Her column runs every other Thursday. Reach her at tperez@davisenterprise.net. Comment on this column at www.davisenterprise.com. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/enterprisetanya

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Posted by Tanya Perez on Jul 25 2011.
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