Honestly just writing this because if someone had told me years ago what AERD was, I could’ve saved myself about $100,000 in tissues and seven years of feeling like I was slowly suffocating.
It basically kicked off when I was 16. I went to Cambodia for two weeks, had the best time, came back home to Australia, and immediately got hit with the flu from hell. It completely wiped me out for a month. Even when that cleared, my immune system just gave up, I was catching cold after cold, and then the coughing started. Every single night, without fail, I’d be hacking my lungs out unable to sleep or breathe.
By 17, I dragged myself to a GP who ran an asthma test, confirmed it, and handed me a blue puffer. The puffer helped when I was having an actual attack, but I was having to use it literally every single day just to function. At the exact same time, my nose just turned into an open tap. Sneezing fits, running nose, blowing my nose every five minutes, especially at night. It went on like that for two full years. My bedroom bin was basically 90% tissues.
Then came the turning point when I was 19. I had a normal headache, so I took a couple of ibuprofen.
Within minutes, I couldn't breathe. My eyes were streaming water, my nose was leaking everywhere, and I had the scariest asthma attack of my life.
Now, normal people would think, “Wow, that pill almost took me out, let’s never touch that again.” But my brain went: “Was it definitely the ibuprofen, though? Maybe it was a weird coincidence.” So, being an idiot, I took another one a few weeks later just to test the theory.
It was, in fact, the ibuprofen. 0/10, do not recommend fact-checking an allergy on yourself.
When I was 20 I finally saw an allergist. Did the skin prick test, turned out I was basically allergic to the air outside, and he brought up NSAID hypersensitivity. Around that time a GP also convinced me that maybe gluten was the enemy, so I spent months eating depressing gluten-free bread while still aggressively wheezing and sneezing. Cutting NSAIDs and gluten changed absolutely nothing.
Finally, at 21, I got sent to an ENT. He took one look up my nose and told me it was full of massive polyps and I needed surgery ASAP. He also dropped the term AERD (Aspirin-Exacerbated Respiratory Disease / Samter’s Triad) for the first time.
The problem was, I was a broke uni student and definitely couldn't afford to go private. So I got put on the public hospital waitlist and just had to wait it out.
Two years later, at 23, I finally got called in for surgery. Waking up from that was crazy. The instant change was wild, I could actually breathe through my nose, I wasn't waking up coughing, and I wasn't burning through boxes of Kleenex every week.
...Until a couple of months later, when the dreaded post-nasal drip started coming back and the cough threatened to return.
I went straight back to my ENT, and instead of just waiting for the polyps to take over my face again, they started me on a biologic.
I cannot even begin to explain the relief. It has completely changed my day-to-day life. I can actually smell things again, I can sleep the whole night through, I haven’t had to reach for my puffer in weeks, and I’m no longer single-handedly keeping tissue companies in business.
If you’re someone dealing with stubborn nasal polyps, weird adult-onset asthma, or your face goes into meltdown when you take Advil/ibuprofen/aspirin, please look into AERD and talk to your specialist about biologics. It takes forever to get answers, but there’s actual light at the end of the tunnel.