It’s no secret that many people dread heading close to the shores of Lake Nipissing in late June and early July.
The reason? That’s the normal time when shadflies leave the lake and blanket the brightly lit downtown core.
It’s a nasty, smelly mess. But for Cathy Caruso, shadflies are much, much worse.
You see, the local letter carrier may be one of the only people with an allergy to shad flies.
The unusual condition began about 10 years ago when she was visiting a friend’s place on Lake Nipissing during shad fly season.
“You know they have that horrible stinky, fishy smell and I was sitting on the deck and I started to kind of cough and sneeze a little bit,” she explained.
“Then I started having difficulty breathing, like wheezing, then my eyes got really itchy so I started rubbing them and I developed so many welts on the tops of my eyes, like big red welts, like my eyes were almost shut.”
The symptoms were too much to tolerate, so Caruso went home and because she continued to struggle to breathe, she went to the hospital to get treatment.
“I told the emergency doctor that I must be allergic to shad flies and they laughed at me because no one had ever come up to them and told them that before,” she said about that first shad fly induced visit to the hospital.
Caruso says she isn’t the first person in her family to suffer from the unusual allergy. She claims her brother William Baril had even worse reactions when he was a child - so bad in fact, that the family would leave town for a vacation to avoid their son’s nasty reaction to the shadfly season.
She even went to her allergist to find out if her allergy is real. She says the allergist has no way to test for a shad fly allergic, but she was told by the allergist that she has a sensitivity to them.
“It’s not a coincidence that every single time I’m near shad flies - I won’t call it anaphylactic, but I can’t be around them, I get really, really, really sick,” said Caruso, who has environmental allergies to dust and pollen.
But the good news is with time, Caruso has learned to combat the unusual allergy.
She says taking antihistamines, a nasal steroid, an asthma inhaler and saline eye drops before she goes outside helps ward off the terrible shadfly reaction.
“If I drugged myself enough I can be okay, it’s getting ahead of it works for me,” she says.
“If I am pro-active ahead of time and then go out, that seems to ward them off and I can manage. If I go without anything they hit me and it’s so fast. I’ve suffered with it and been completely miserable so I know to be pro-active and handle it better.”
Now Caruso just hopes to persevere and get back to normal, and once again breathe easier when the shadfly infestation is over.
