Sometimes I start wheezing, sneezing or coughing when someone walks back in after a cigarette break and they have stale smoke on their clothes, but that tends to start as a nasal reaction and then spread to my lungs. This was like everything being attacked at once: eyes, nose, throat and lungs. I felt like there was a load of fluid at the bottom of my lungs and I would drown in it, and I felt sick because of the sudden copious production of snot. And no one near me had gone out to smoke, buy flowers or groom a cat! Nothing had changed at all! I just started coughing and choking for no reason.
For the sake of needing to find a cause, I'm going to blame the air conditioner - I was sitting right under it, and I hate air conditioned air - it's always too dry and too cold, and in this country full of dust (no one here cleans their air conditioners, so they blow dirty, stale air around), and maybe my chest became physically too cold. But I dunno. It was very nasty, not least of all because I had someone on the damn phone and I needed to get them off the phone so I could cough in peace without a complete stranger asking if I was okay. Argh. They should teach us that in training - "What to do when you start coughing to death while talking to someone". Not that I actually plan to do this job for much longer.
I need allergy drugs that actually work.