The 6 Most Terrifying Allergies You Can Actually Get

"Why yes, I have been playing video games for 17 straight hours," they say from their sweat-soaked sofa. "It's the only thing keeping me alive."

"What's it going to do to me?"
Symptoms begin after you've finished exercising. It can start with hives and skin irritation. Then comes tightness in the chest, difficulty breathing and then coughing.

Of course, any out of shape person will recognize most of those symptoms from their own bouts with exercise (or trips to the mailbox without a mobility assistance scooter). The important question in determining if you're actually allergic is what happens next. Do the symptoms recede while you leaf through your catalog of gender-neutral tent dresses? If so, you're probably just in bad shape.

If you do have an exercise allergy, things should be progressing from the already crappy hives, coughing, chest-tightness stage to what's called anaphylactic shock. It's easy to recognize because your blood pressure plummets, your lungs close and you experience fainting and many other things doctors call symptoms and we call "dying."

By this point, someone should be calling an ambulance. If not, either no one likes you or they decided your retarded exercise allergy is simply natural selection at work.

"God says oxygen is for closers."

"For the love of God, what do I do?"
As you've probably guessed by now, this isn't just a "get fat for free" card. In fact with all this attention being paid to exercise, your doctor's still going to want you to move around, just at a slower pace. So now you're the guy walking 2 MPH on the treadmill, creeping everyone out at the gym. Your only solace will be how much worse it would get if you did decide to push it to 2.5, making you the guy who collapses mid-lunge forcing the cute receptionist to call 911 while you wheeze and crap your pants, and everyone crowds around you, whispering, "That guy looks like he's going to die any second. Let's watch."

After telling you that you have a cold allergy and your life as you know it is effectively over, he'll likely give you antihistamines and advise you to avoid the cold, which again makes it seem like pretty much anybody can be a doctor with a few hours training. Either way it means for a few months out of the year (depending on where you live) you'll be known as that creepy shut-in who stares longingly out the window and scares the shit out of the local children. Though we should note that some of you are already that guy without the aid of any medical condition.

So what else could you be allergic to that would give you even more of an excuse to stay inside and surf for internet porn?

Why would you end up in the emergency room, you ask? Well this is yet another allergy that could lead to anaphylaxis. So, once again, we have the dropping blood pressure and the victim trying to suck air through uncooperative lungs. In a nutshell, this means you could die a horrible, horrible death, the sun effectively becoming God's gigantic death ray.

"For the love of God, what do I do?"
You go to your doctor and get tortured some more. Seriously. A diagnosis is made when the skin is exposed to various forms of light, or sometimes just regular old sunlight, while they watch to see just how hivey you get. It will be around here that you'll start to wonder if your doctor is enjoying this, and come to the undeniable conclusion that he is.

Antihistimes or oral steroids will only decrease your symptoms, not make them disappear. They can try to desensitize your skin with repeated exposures to sunlight, seemingly following the Tyler Durden method of alleviating suffering. That therapy only lasts for a few days and needs to be repeated frequently, which in your mind, probably appears to be missing the point. We'll just stay inside, thanks.

This reaction tends to be on the woman's side in the sense that we can't find any examples of men whose semen makes all women react badly (except in a metaphorical sense). What we do have examples of is men being allergic to their own semen. So let that sink in for a moment.

"What's it going to do to me?"
This is where it could get ugly. That whole area down there is not a great place for a woman to break out in an allergic reaction, and the sensation has been described as feeling "like 1,000 needles have been injected in them at one time."

Reports show women could have swelling, itching, burning of the genital areas, and in severe cases, our old friend anaphylaxis shows up. So if at any point during intercourse, your partner starts screaming, "OH NO, MY BODY IS ON FIRE AND I CAN'T BREATHE," your response should not be, "THAT'S RIGHT, MY DONG IS THE LOST ARK OF THE COVENANT AND YOUR VAGINA IS THE NAZIS."

After several hours of apology

"For the love of God, what do I do?"
Finally some god news. Researchers have found that having sex two to three times a week can help quite a bit, though maybe this isn't as fun as it sounds with the whole "feeling like 1,000 needles" thing.

The alternative is they can give the woman allergy shots to desensitize her to the semen. These injections would include small doses of her partner's semen. So basically, either do the nasty as much as possible (possibly while she's breaking out in hives and can't breathe) or have the doctor do a semen injection. If it's the latter just make sure you're absolutely clear in your instructions, and that he is actually a doctor.

"But Cracked writers," you're probably saying, "Surely we've reached the end of the list! How could any allergy be worse than this?"

This condition, called Aquagenic Urticaria is very rare, but people do have it and somehow they're still alive.

"What's it going to do to me?"
The itchy hives will usually develop within 15 minutes of contact with water, but can last for a couple of hours. So bad news, you'd have to give up going to the pool and hitting on all the younger bikini-clad girls who affectionately call you, "That creepy old molester-looking guy we had to call the cops on that time." Unless you want to risk the chance of one of them splashing water at you, causing a painful breakout and earning you the new nickname, "Creepy old molester guy who appears to be slowly turning into a lobster."

And don't forget how bad you would smell. The Australian girl who was in the news with this condition has to take one-minute showers. Any more than that, and she'll break out in hives that itch so badly she'll scratch them until they bleed.

For those of you thinking that this is yet another allergy that fits neatly into your no sun/exercise/shower lifestyle, imagine how you'd react to the sound of thunder if you knew rain was going to react like acid on your skin. We're thinking it'd be less than awesome.

You should also cancel any invasions of other planets that are mostly water

"For the love of God, what do I do?"
We decided to let this website speak for itself:

"If the water itself is causing the hives, then doctors will usually recommend using a steroid cream or antihistamine to treat the symptoms. The goal of this treatment is to relieve the symptoms, and hope that the condition goes away by itself. There are no approved medications that will cure water urticaria, and there is no guarantee that they will go away on their own. There is only hope.

There are two issues with this approach:

First--these medications are not a cure, they only treat the symptoms. Second--is that steroids and antihistamines can have severe side effects. They are not intended for long-term use."

Wow, all of those words when a simple, "You're fucked" would have sufficed. We hope you're the "hopeful" kind of person that doesn't mind "severe side effects" that even the website won't name, presumably because they're so horrific that now the writer can't sleep at night and lays curled up in a ball, sucking on their thumb. Though probably not because, if you're allergic to water, we're guessing you're allergic to hope, too.

If you liked that, check out Your Body Hates You: 6 Gruesome Disorders Anyone Can Get. And remember to watch Gladstone countdown The 6 Most Underwhelming Moments from Steve Jobs' iPhone 3G Unveiling.