Bless me (sniff), for I have endured the season of sinus congestion

It’s time we stopped laughing at Sneezy - he’s a hero to people like me.

November 12, 2026 — 9:54am

Write what you know, they say. Well, I know sinus congestion. I’ve known it all my life. I have suffered from terrible allergies since childhood. Sinus function is my true life-long obsession. Hay fever season is drawing to a close soon, thank god, but at this time of year, my fixation is especially acute. My body shrieks histamines at every waking moment. My nose is blocked, my ears are popped and my eyes leak. My suffering is all I can think about.

The hysterical immune system breeds a paranoid mind. Visible and invisible irritants are everywhere. Pollen, grass, dust, mould – all out to get me. It is a kind of madness. But where is our literature of the allergic? Am I the person to write it?

In popular culture, allergic rhinitis is played for laughs. From The Simpsons to Happy Days to Snow White and Parks and Recreation, allergies are an affliction of the nerdy, the awkward or the ridiculous. Noel Coward wrote a whole play in 1924, Hay Fever, that is not even about seasonal allergies. The title is just a cutesy metaphor for passing delirium. It is a comedy of manners about some chaotic toffs and their hilarious weekend in the country.

Funny? Not to me. I would like to see seasonal allergies depicted in popular culture like respiratory disease in 19th-century novels – as the essence of human suffering, and perhaps as a conduit to great spiritual insight. I would like to see the subject treated with the deepest gravity. A person who suffers from allergic rhinitis should not be a figure of comedy or ridicule. She should be a figure of inspiration – a ravaged survivor who, through immense suffering, attains the highest levels of dignity.

Sometimes you’ll hear parents describe their child as an “old soul”. I find it a bit of a braggy descriptor – it annoys me – but perhaps I just don’t appreciate sharing the title because I identify as an old soul myself. When did I grow old? At the age of six, during a hay ride on the back of a tractor at the farm of some family friends. I sneezed and sneezed and sneezed, ageing five years with each convulsion, until I staggered off the tractor – haggard and stooped, a primary-school crone – and collapsed into my mother’s arms. We do not see the exhaustion and the misery in our cultural representations of the chronically allergic. No, it’s all flapping Kleenex and comic relief.

Sneezy, the allergic dwarf in Snow White, is a classic example. His powerful sneezes have been widely celebrated as case studies of the “squash-and-stretch” principle of physical comedy in animation. But I would like to see less focus on the animators’ achievements and more focus on Sneezy himself. He’s an icon of allergic resilience. Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s off to work he goes, in the face of great discomfort.

I would also like to see a contemporary spin-off production, which centres on Sneezy and his tortured interior world, specifically his tortured sinuses. It should not be a comedy. It should not be an animation. It should be a low-lit 12-part prestige drama. The score – solo cello, ambient drones – emphasises the weight of Sneezy’s emotional distress but also his detachment from reality as the swelling in his nasal passages causes the blockage of his Eustachian tubes.

Every day, his ears are popped and his vision is blurred by salty immunoglobulin tears, yet he bravely sings his heigh-ho song and marches, sneezing, to the diamond mine with his brothers. In the finale, Sneezy smuggles all the diamonds out of the mine and buys himself a mansion with a medical grade multilevel air-purifying system. He lives out the rest of his days in peace and comfort, contemplating the suffering-to-enlightenment spiritual pipeline.

Snow White is most likely based on folklore stories from the Middle Ages. Back then, the cure for allergic rhinitis was probably beheading. There have been times, these past few months, when I have wondered if that cure might not be preferable to the insipid Nasonex-and-Claratyne combo I take daily throughout spring to little effect. At other times, I cling to the consoling possibility of dramatising my suffering through Great Art.

One day, I shall write the Great Australian Allergy Novel. It’ll have a William Faulkner vibe – bleak, wretched, the agony of human existence, etcetera – until one day the heroine sneezes so seismically that she rips all the plane trees in her city from their roots. The plane trees die. In the final scenes, she wanders through shadeless streets, breathing through nostrils as clear and giant as two industrial wind tunnels. It’s a story of sinus function. It’s a story of spring-time survival. Who’s with me?

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Sophie Quick is the author of The Confidence Woman

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