asthma anyone?

I've been sneezing a lot lately. 10 or 20 times a day I have little sneezing fits for no reason. But I don't have allergies, I swear. I'd prefer to think it's just some kind of seizure or nervous tic this sneezing. A product of neurosis, but not some kind of diagnosable illness.

I was raised in a household where no one believed that allergies were a real thing. Kind of like the tooth fairy. Never mind that my poor brother was clearly allergic to our cat and basically had a permanently drippy nose and red itchy eyes. I think it was acknowledged that his body was intolerant of the cat, but this was apparently never thought of as a reason to NOT have the cat. He'd be over on his side of the table sniffling in between bites of dry pork chop, and my dad, not even looking up from his food would grumble "get a tissue"... MY GOD PEOPLE! I just realized I was raised by wolves! Nowadays if a kid so much as expresses a dislike for something we assume they are allergic and whatever the substance in question is, we ban it for life.

We have hepa filters in both our bedroom and Jack's room, but they are as much for making white noise when we sleep at night as they are for air cleaning. Today I was in Target in between auditions and they just happened to have the replacement filters, right there on the shelf. I've known for a while that we need new ones, but they never have them at the store, and ordering them online always seems to be the last thing on my mind when I'm on the computer 14 hours a day. So there they were, I bought them, brought them home, and set to replacing the old filters. Uhm... This is what I found.

That's when I remembered that I think I changed the filter (which is supposed to be changed every 3 months) right after we moved here nearly 3 years ago. I'm blaming momnesia. But I think maybe I've found the source of my sneezes....