Pollen time. Hay Fever season. Ahchoo! Runny noses. Congested lungs. Stopped up heads. That’s if you’re one of the luckier ones. Thanks to the marvels of modern medicine help is available.

“Well, what we do is give you a shot of stuff that-”, the Doctor tells you.

“Stuff?”, you ask.

“Yea, stuff. Oh, there’s some technical name but who can keep up with all that? Each day you come in and get a shot. They hurt like the dickens but they work. There’s a series of 26 shots. That covers everything we can cover.”

“How long does the pollen season last?”, you ask.

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe a couple or three weeks.”

“What’s my advantage?”

“Hmm”, is the doctor’s response to that.

Grandma had her own personal remedy. It had to do with garlic and a small net bag. Grandpa said it didn’t do anything for his hayfever. Grandma said, after he passed away, that it did wonders for his roaming around. No woman would come near him.

One drug company did develop a one shot preventative for pollen allergies.

“So, what happens is that the drug senses the urge to sneeze and stifles it”, the researcher told the FDA.

“Stifles it?”, the FDA gal asked.

“Yea, stifles it. Stops it dead in it’s tracks.”

They needed to test it first. They used a test dummy named Homer Somethingortheother. The test was going along fine... at first. Homer would say he felt the urge to sneeze and it would go away. This happened a couple or three times when Homer suddenly exploded.

Can’t hold a sneeze back.