Lately I am swimming at 2 different pools. I am a late blooming, 45yo, fitness swimmer. I am up to doing about 3800 yds per workout. I find that I often have a very runny nose and sneezing fits that can last the entire day. I will take benedryl but it only seems to help a bit. I have tried to pay attention and think that one of the pools may be causing much more of a problem than the other.
As an experiment I tried takign a single benedryl (sp?) about a half hour before swimming. THis seems to be helping. So am I alergic to the water?
Is this common and what other suggestions if any?
Parents
Former Member
They once did a survey, I think at Johns Hopkins, and patients wrote on a paper what they thought they were allergic to. Oxygen was included in a lot of answers. Another study or story is that if you give a glass of water containing only water to 1,000 people and have them visit a doctor, half will have some complaints related to the "water" they took. Chlorine is part of our daily lives. If there is excess of chlorine in the water you drink or in the pool you swim, you might get irritation from it. Just like drinking salt water might make you puke, but not when drinking Gatorade, which contains the very same salt. It is all a question of excesses. As for allergy, George above is right, you can't be allergic to something that is so much part of your daily life. I would believe that a sinus condition is a combination of many factors, the least of which would be the swimming.Last week I had, for the first time in decades, an inner ear infection. It happened the evening after a swimming meet at a public pool where I swam a 400 freestyle and a 50 butterfly (butterstruggle the last 10 meters). I immediately blamed the pool and started to self treat myself with alcohol and other stuff into my ear. When I went to the doctor on Monday and he looked at my ear he told me it was not on the outer part but inside, and had nothing to do with anything on the exterior. Actually it was caused by some nose-throat-whatever which communicates with the inner ear. So I took the medication and stopped dumping alcohol and peroxide into my ear. The infection and inflammation went away within a week. Take care, billy fanstone
They once did a survey, I think at Johns Hopkins, and patients wrote on a paper what they thought they were allergic to. Oxygen was included in a lot of answers. Another study or story is that if you give a glass of water containing only water to 1,000 people and have them visit a doctor, half will have some complaints related to the "water" they took. Chlorine is part of our daily lives. If there is excess of chlorine in the water you drink or in the pool you swim, you might get irritation from it. Just like drinking salt water might make you puke, but not when drinking Gatorade, which contains the very same salt. It is all a question of excesses. As for allergy, George above is right, you can't be allergic to something that is so much part of your daily life. I would believe that a sinus condition is a combination of many factors, the least of which would be the swimming.Last week I had, for the first time in decades, an inner ear infection. It happened the evening after a swimming meet at a public pool where I swam a 400 freestyle and a 50 butterfly (butterstruggle the last 10 meters). I immediately blamed the pool and started to self treat myself with alcohol and other stuff into my ear. When I went to the doctor on Monday and he looked at my ear he told me it was not on the outer part but inside, and had nothing to do with anything on the exterior. Actually it was caused by some nose-throat-whatever which communicates with the inner ear. So I took the medication and stopped dumping alcohol and peroxide into my ear. The infection and inflammation went away within a week. Take care, billy fanstone
