I took a £20 Tesco home test to try to answer a lifelong question

As somebody who sneezes and coughs no matter the season, I’ve always suspected that I have a number of allergies. Of course, I take an antihistamine when I visit the family cat, a very fluffy girl called Toastie, and I am also an asthmatic, so I need my inhaler daily, but I’d never actually been tested for the allergies I believed I had.

Enter the £20 Allergy Test kit from Tesco, which I was able to find in the pharmacy section in the Park Road superstore. I was quite keen to try it, so when I got back to the office, it was all systems go.

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I won’t lie, I struggled to interpret the instructions, maybe because I have AuDHD, or maybe because I’m the kind of person who switches off when people read the rules to a card game. Either way, I enlisted the help of Affiliates writer Emily Sleight.

I won’t post the entire instructions in full, but it took a bit of faffing (especially since I was vlogging the experience) before we were able to get the sample into the test kit. It was around 45 minutes of waiting before I got the results.

I was really surprised to find out that, according to the test, I do not have any allergies. I’m not sure if maybe I got a step wrong along the way, but the fact that the control line appeared at the top makes me think that I didn’t. Of course, I would suggest if you're worried about allergies to book a doctor's appointment, but it is a cost effective alternative to other private healthcare options that offer allergy testing.

As I mentioned earlier, I do get plenty of sniffles and coughs, so I was surprised by that answer. The positive here is that I can continue to cuddle Toastie the cat without feeling guilt about my nose and lungs.