I wonder sometimes if I should just stop posting updates about my various trips to the hospital, as it must appear to the casual reader that I’m falling apart. I’m not – if that’s any reassurance.

Today’s excitement was actually planned before Christmas. Back in December I had enthusiastically shoveled a handful of hazelnuts into my mouth (read: healthy snack) only for my mouth and throat to feel like I’d used a mouthwash of bleach. This didn’t seem like a reasonable reaction and so I avoided any more hazelnuts and pottered to see my GP.

He was very lovely, asked me some questions and then declared that he had no idea what to do and then asked if I wanted to be referred. “Well”, I said, “I don’t want to make a fuss, but I think I probably should”. Two months passed and today I headed to the Wythenshawe mega-hospital complex for a series of needles and skin prick tests.

Over those two months, I dabbled in the occasional nut-based fancy. It’s basically impossible to get through Christmas without a rogue almond getting through. I was mostly fine, just a bit of an irritated mouth, tongue and throat when I’d eat them. More recently I had started to notice this happening with bread, which I didn’t like the idea of. I thought that it might have been nuts in the granary bread until I baked some bread last week and had a similar reaction. This was not good.

So I got to see the doctor in the clinic today – who seemed super-smart and super-helpful. I’d arrived an hour early because of the possible traffic problems and I was seen immediately.

I was given the usual grilling on health background and then had some blood taken. Apparently they can tell a lot about allergies from a blood sample, which is amazing, I just don’t understand why they need quite so much of it… They took three lots, which seems overkill to me.

Then I had a skin prick test for a range of nuts, wheat, grass some other stuff. As soon as the nurse had finished, my right arm turned blotchy and itchy. My left “nut arm” was similarly itchy on one of the dots. After 20 minutes of resisting the urge to scratch them, it turned out that I had reacted to hazelnuts and had quite a strong reaction to birch pollen. The latter is irritating because we have a birch tree in the garden, but might explain the sore eyes I’ve been getting in the spring.

As I waited to see the doctor again, I comforted myself that although a life without Nutella sounds like a life not worth living, I could at least still enjoy peanut butter, Snickers, Chinese food with cashews and all that tasty pistachio based grub. I continued to happily console myself whilst in the consultation room and hearing the words “no nuts at all Mr Hanlon” being uttered. I accept that there are a million worse things that a doctor can tell you, but I really do like nuts… and my guess is that now that I’ve been told that I can’t have it, I’ll see it everywhere and crave it all the time.

Having said that, there is a chink of light at the end of the tunnel. The blood tests take a day or two to come back and then they do some other correlating against my medical history. I’ve got another appointment at the end of March and they’ll tell me if the allergy is super-bad or just irritating and how to manage it. But as the doctor said, you basically manage it by “not eating nuts, Mr Hanlon”. Grr.

As I was leaving the building I got into a conversation with another bloke who was keen to tell me that he’d developed an allergic reaction and that he was so relieved that it wasn’t a food allergy. “How about you?”, he asked. “Well, I seem to have developed a nut allergy”, I replied, downbeat by this point. “Oh, I LOVE nuts!”, he proclaimed, “I couldn’t possibly live without them.”

I don’t think anyone would have blamed me if I’d punched him in the face at that moment.

It was time to go and get the kids, make dinner and do the first part of the Cubs / Scout run. I’d already had my walk at 6:15 this morning because I knew that I’d be busy in the day. So with that out the way, I went to the gym after dinner leaving enough time to pick up Lily at 9. In my reboot of the NROL Hypertrophy programme, I’m starting again at week 1. I can lift and pull things slightly heavier than at the start of the year, but it all seems very heavy and like a lot of hard work. I’ll probably hurt tomorrow and Wednesday, but I know this is a good thing.

Oh, and Better Call Saul has started on Netflix, so that was the evening’s entertainment sorted – although there wasn’t enough time for The Walking Dead. Jude’s away for two nights and then it’s dancing on Thursday, so there will be a mammoth TV catch-up on Friday night.

Fingers crossed that’s the last health related update for a while… at least until the end of March.