I'm allergic to a city...

My last four days in Hong Kong were spent like this:

Monday: I went to the Chinese University in Hong Kong to work on my project, but retreated back to the air conditioned hostel when I felt something on my face start to itch. By that night the whole bottom half of my face was red, bumpy, itchy, and a little puffy, which means that I was having an allergic reaction to something. I took a good dose of Benadryl and passed out.

Tuesday: I woke up to find that the reaction had taken over most of the rest of my face, my neck, and the backs of my hands, breaking my previous record for amount of surface area covered by an allergic reaction. I decided to go on an experimental excursion outside to see the effect that the Hong Kong weather would have on my face (also to talk to a pharmacist). My face blew up like a blowfish, and my hands and arms fully broke out as well. I retreated back to the hostel once again.

Wednesday: Spent the entire day in the hostel, hoping that air conditioning, Benadryl, and will power would deflate my face. It didn't get any worse, which was good, but it didn't get any better either.

Thursday: Spent the entire day in the hostel again, before I darted out to the nearest pharmacy, to make sure that nothing too bad could happen while I was flying, and then caught the bus to the airport at around 4:30, even though my flight wasn't until 11:05. Normally I'm not one of those people that likes to get to the airport six hours early (as demonstrated by my experience trying to get to the airport in Melbourne), but when I've been in self-imposed quarantine in a tiny room on the 16th floor of a smelly building for the better part of four days, six hours at the airport was looking pretty good.

So the real mistake in all of this was that I didn't take any pictures. Now, looking back through normal sized eyelids and clear skin, I wish I had taken a picture every six hours to document the completely ridiculous progression of the reaction. At the time, however, a picture of me sequestered in a tiny hostel reading an 850 page book and looking like I had been on the wrong side of an argument with 8000 very tiny but very angry mosquitoes just didn't seem like fun. So there is no documentation of what I looked like. But I can promise that I barely looked human.

Now for the good news. My reaction started feeling immensely better during my 12 hour flight to Istanbul. When I got off the plane and went to look in a mirror, I could see something that resembled my usual face shape emerging. In hour four of my five hour layover there, I braved a glance in the mirror again and saw that some patches of skin were even returning to their normal color (although texture was still way off). The second pharmacist I talked to in Hong Kong had told me that it was possible, once something little had set me off, that the heat and air quality in the city were what I was having trouble with. It seemed ridiculous that I could be allergic to the entire city, but since going outside in Hong Kong made it worse and leaving started an immediate turnaround, I have to admit that it seems like the most plausible explanation.

Then I made a little kid cry. I was sitting at the gate in Istanbul, when a little girl who was running around stopped right in front of me. Forgetting that I barely looked human (I had just woken up from a nap) I smiled at her. Her eyes got wide, she burst into tears, then ran and hid behind her mother's legs. I felt kind of bad, but it was also pretty funny (since the reaction was finally retreating, I could see the humor in the situation).