Location Taken: Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
Time Taken: October 2012
I had a headache today due to excessive sun exposure. Had to take a nap to give my body a chance to recover, hiding myself away from every source of light to speed up the process.
It’s not just a headache, mind you. It’s also a general lethargy and inability to think properly. I just stop really being productive at anything for several hours. It’s really subtle, and comes on slowly, and I only realize I’m experiencing the symptoms when I’m solidly in the midst of them.
The oddest part of my sunlight allergy is that the symptoms don’t trigger until a few hours after I’m done with the exposure that triggered the whole thing. I can finish up whatever chore it is that’s taking me outdoors just fine, and be well and thoroughly home and out of the sun, and then it will hit.
It took me a long time to figure out why I’d occasionally get these weird times of headache and lethargy. The key time was one day when I went biking and got a rather high dose of direct sunlight, including one five minute stretch where I was just sitting in the sunlight at a convenient bench waiting for my Mom to do an extra loop I didn’t feel up to. That night was the one and only time I’ve had a full migraine. After that key incident, I started checking the correlation patterns between sunlight exposure and headaches several hours later, and found a very strong pattern of the two going together.
Thanks to that delay, I’m suspecting it’s not the sunlight itself I’m allergic to, but one of the products the body makes using what it gains from sunlight. It’s not vitamin D, since I can (and do) take supplements of that with no difficulty at all. But there’s probably a whole host of chemicals the body makes using sunlight, not just the most famous one. Alas, all this is conjecture, and I have no real way to test for which exact substance is causing the allergic reaction.
Mind you, I’ve long suspected I had a sunlight allergy. For one thing, while people around me claim that sunlight feels good on their skin, to me it feels unpleasant. It’s not something I’d call painful, but it’s more like a constant prickling and a feeling that something’s not quite right in the exposed patches of skin. I like saying “I can feel the photons bouncing off my skin!” and that’s not too far from the truth. I’ve long had the lifestyle pattern of staying inside and loving cloudy or rainy days far more than sunny ones. I don’t get headaches from indirect or diffused sunlight. There’s probably just not enough of it to overload my system at those times.
These days, though, I continue to live in an area with large numbers of sunny days, and I can’t avoid all exposure. Today it was just what I got while driving in two half-hour stretches, and it wiped me out for about three hours in the evening. It can be quite irritating, especially since I don’t have an internal meter that says “this much sunlight is ok, but any more will be bad”. It’s not for several hours until I get feedback in the form of pain, which is a terrible way to learn how to avoid stuff for far too many reasons.
