If you're only experiencing this on a seasonal basis, chances are it really is only an allergy. If that's the case, I would at least go see my primary if I were you. There are plenty of options that won't leave you drowsy like Benadryl does and there's a good chance you can get something that will improve your breathing and all that. Besides that, it would be good to find out if it really is just allergies because you may be trying to treat something you think is allergies when it's actually something else. It's a long story, but that happened to me and now I am taking treatments for asthma that I probably brought on myself to an extent. At any rate, I was scared off nasal sprays forever a year or so ago because of their generally high incidence of the "bounceback effect" (where the more you use them, the more you need to because your symptoms come back much worse.) That happened in a really big way to me and I ended up having to deal with it surgically as a result. I know that Flonase advertises that it has a low incdence of that, and that may be true, but I would definitely explore other options before I went to any kind of nasal spray. The shots are certainly an option, but I've heard mixed reviews on those -- a co-worker swears by them and says they have significantly improved his quality of life, but another friend of mine says that seemed to work for a while and then abruptly stopped working and she had to get a whole new round of testing because she was past the period of the first test when it happened. The test is probably worth it, but for some reason a lot of doctors don't want to go that route until they've exhausted everythign else, so if you want to do that, be insistent with your doctor about it. Otherwise, they'll keep playing trial and error and it'll take a year to get to where you know you want to be now.
