I recently found out that a sign that you are about to enter intoanaphylaxis due to an allergic reaction is"an impending sense of doom". Which of course given how this year has gone thus far, is quite humorous. How would I pick up on an extra sense of doom? Can "doom" be compounded into Double Doom? Doom to the second power, perhaps? Indeed, if I were to showcase just how dark (for me) my sense of humor has gotten (I blame TikTok), I would suggest that my impending sense of doom has been a constant stream of nerves: fires, evacuations, dry lightning storms, a global pandemic, a nine week furlough, the waiting of over five weeks for unemployment assistance, the Black Lives Matter movement, marching in the streets and dodging cars (some narrowly missed), family relationships...
Safe to say that this year has been a tropical storm of a constant down-pour of doom, if you will. Or perhaps a sea of doom that has no waves but instead just a very still, very stoic, deep, bottomless sea of just solid...dank dark doom. We could call this sea the Doom-Doom Room - or perhaps that could be the name of the bar that serves up salty cocktails (no Happy Hour, sorry) along side the Sea of Doom.
All this to say that I am very allergic to bees, terrified of needles, and got stung by a wasp mere minutes after arriving to a protest, while also not owning an EpiPen. The immediate fire that spread throughout my kneecap and leg was...intense. I felt my adrenaline spike and my palms go sweaty as I began to panic, but phew, I was able to determine I was ok. My rapidly developing red welt was certainly making it's complaint known, but no deep, "impending sense of doom" was taking over...and I was breathing fine. I would later learn that what I had was "a large local reaction" which is yes, an allergic response, but not one that could lead to anaphylactic shock (thank goodness).
We're going to survive this, right? The chances of that asteroid that NASA told us about striking our planet one whole day before our presidential election are infinitesimal...right?
