Here’s What I Keep in My Medicine Cabinet for Seasonal Allergies and Asthma
Key takeaways:
When seasonal allergies and asthma flare up, Trish Smith has her own medication arsenal to relieve her symptoms.
She has learned from experience that it’s best to bring her medicine kit with her when she travels abroad.
Here are the essentials in her mini medicine kit that’s now on her travel packing list.
Our Medicine Cabinet series explores what real people keep on hand and consider essential for their particular needs — even if a doctor didn’t prescribe it.
Twice a year, Trish Smith says she feels like nature is trying to kill her.
During the spring and fall, her seasonal allergies often flare up, and she needs to take medicine. During her recent visit to Ireland, she realized the importance of having her allergy medications nearby. She has a reaction to tree pollen that nearly ruined her trip.
Here are her go-tos that she will no longer travel without.
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1. Benadryl for her sneezing, itching, and runny nose
Trish says she tends to forget she has allergies because she didn’t start having symptoms until she was an adult.
“I tend to think of myself as someone who doesn’t have seasonal allergies,” she says. “So every year, it catches me by surprise.”
For her, working out in the yard during spring will trigger allergies, as well as during the early fall. “Typically, April and October here are really bad for me,” she says.
It starts, she says, with situational asthma that gives her a persistent cough. Other symptoms include an irritated throat and eyes, body aches, and extreme fatigue.
“In the spring, it makes me really sleepy,” she says. “I just fall asleep all the time during the day. It’s like I have narcolepsy.”
When those symptoms appear, she says, she turns to her medicine cabinet.
She makes sure to stock common cold medications and Benadryl (diphenhydramine), an over-the-counter (OTC) oral medication that's commonly used to treat allergies, common cold symptoms, and itching.
“The thing that works for me is cold medicine,” she says. “I also take Benadryl tablets. Those are the things that really, really help.”
2. An inhaler for her asthma
When things get really bad, Trish turns to her inhaler.
She uses Primatene Mist (epinephrine) — an OTC spray — for short-term relief of mild asthma symptoms — such as wheezing, shortness of breath, and tightness in the chest.
She switches to albuterol (Ventolin) — a prescription rescue inhaler — “when it’s really bad,” she says.
She says the albuterol inhaler helps her breathe better and reduces inflammation caused by allergies.
3. Cold medicine to clear her stuffy nose
When she has a stuffy nose that can come along with seasonal allergies, Trish also likes to have cold medicine on hand to clear her nasal passages.
“I’ve tried nasal drains before, but I find that severe cold and flu medicine and my inhaler seem to work best. Sometimes I take Theraflu Severe Cold & Cough because it’s a warm and comforting way to take medicine.”
If those don’t work, she says, she’ll turn to the Emergen-C and Alka-Seltzer in her medicine cabinet.
“That will take care of most of it,” she says. “The aspirin in the Alka-Seltzer will help with the body aches, and the Emergen-C will take care of the rest of the symptoms. I find the B vitamins really help me feel better, and effervescence is an effective drug delivery method.”
Sometimes, however, the impact of the allergies can knock her off of her feet for a few days.
On a recent trip to Dublin, she realized she wasn’t feeling well. She says she was afraid it might be COVID-19, so she went to her hotel room. She tested herself and chose to rest.
“I just couldn’t stop coughing,” she says. “I remember the next day, we were walking through Dublin, and this breeze kicked up a ton of leaves and pollen in front of us. I wondered if that was what was making me feel so bad. I decided to go to bed early that night and take it easy the rest of the trip.”
But without the medicines she normally had at home in her medicine cabinet, getting better wasn’t as easy.
“I didn’t have my inhaler with me,” she says. “In Dublin, you have to get an appointment and a prescription to get one. I was taking Benadryl and other cold remedies. I was managing the symptoms somewhat, but I didn’t seem to be getting any better.”
The allergies persisted throughout the rest of the trip. Once home, however, she headed for her doctor.
4. Prednisone in a pinch — to calm her immune responses
Even after her Ireland trip, Trish’s coughing persisted.
“I was still coughing my head off in the airport,” she says. “I was worried everyone on the plane would think I was positive for COVID, and kept apologizing to everyone around me, telling them it was just allergies. A couple of days after we got back, I went to the doctor and it was so bad they put me on prednisone.”
Prednisone is a corticosteroid. Trish can’t keep it in her standby emergency kit since it has to be prescribed, but she will seek out a doctor if she has the kind of reaction she did in Ireland.
Her doctor told her she likely had a reaction to a kind of Irish tree pollen she hadn’t experienced before. After a few days on the prednisone, her symptoms get better pretty quickly. Healing from the trip to Dublin, however, took about a week, she says.
“It calms down really fast once I get the steroids,” Trish says. “But this time, it was so bad it took a little bit longer.”
5. A mini medicine cabinet is now on her travel packing list
Trish suggests that people with allergies and asthma bring their medications when traveling abroad. She travels a lot and carries small versions of her medicine cabinet in her bags. She always keeps small bottles of necessary items, like Benadryl, ready to pack for trips.
“It’s important to have them in their original packaging,” she says. “Sometimes, security will be very picky about medications. It’s always best to have prescriptions in bottles with clearly readable labels, or to have over-the-counter medication in their original bottles. I always put them in a separate gallon-sized Ziploc bag, so I can easily pull them all out, if needed.”
When traveling, it’s not necessary to bring all your medicine. Instead, Trish says, bring travel-sized containers of allergy remedies, cold medicines, and pain relievers in case of allergic reactions.
Trish says she took some of her allergy medications, like Benadryl, with her to Dublin, but not her inhaler. She says having Benadryl made the unexpected reaction easier to deal with. But having her prescription inhaler could have alleviated her symptoms sooner.
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