Allergies

1. Contact with allergen.
2. Foggy headedness, immediately after for up to a few hours - this worsens depending as to how strongly I was reacting before the contact. If I was perfectly healthy, skip this step.
3. Coming Up (or Down?!), anywhere from half an hour to several hours (12+) after exposure, for a few hours (2-5) - a period where I feel very irritable, tense, anxious, and/or insecure, but at the same time I'll also feel somewhat confident and euphoric, but only at the very beginning of the reaction. Of course, the confidence doesn't really make up for the anxiousness, so it's not really apparent. Around this time is also when I'll feel like I really "need" weed, because not only do I know that I'll be getting worse soon, but t
4. Hives, instantly to up to 24 hours after exposure - They'll start as small red dots surrounded by a ring of pale skin. They'll get larger and the paleness will go away over the next few hours. During this time, the irritable and anxious feelings from the transition period will intensify and the euphoria will become totally absent.
5. Rebound, 12+ hours after exposure - Shifting neurotransmitter levels give me a huge range of emotions if the reaction is strong, much less so if it's not, however they're almost always above a somewhat thin layer of annoyance, futility, "sense of impending doom", or anxiousness. Symptoms can include excessive talking, excitement, paranoia, feelings of insecurity, euphoria, difficulty in using memory, difficulty in performing physically demanding tasks, fatigue, lowered stamina, tiredness, apathy, and a bunch of other crap. If you look up "histamine abundance" on Wikipedia, pretty much all of those. Generally, though, an increasingly strong foggy headedness as the reaction goes on, and a decreasingly strong irritability.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until I "finish reacting" and the hives and irritability are no longer climbing. This whole thing can take anywhere from 12 hours to a couple of days. The closer I am to the end, the more tired I'll be, and the more paranoid I'll be of another reaction (obviously). Repeat step 2 if I'm still working out previous reactions.
7. I get my bearings. I get the sense that my body was hibernating, or under attack, or just plain sleeping up until this point, depending as to how long I've been reacting for. Around here I'll notice all the things that need to be done that I haven't, which is sometimes stressing. This step is obviously absent if I get attacked again before this.

Allergies work in waves, depending as to how much I'm reacting to something, building up and up and layering on top. Lately, though, this hasn't been the case, I've been much more under control. Go me.