Jack Averty: Life’s a sneeze in summertime and hay, we all nose why it is!

No doubt households across the country have been blasting it to celebrate this past week of summer heat hell – with those famous lyrics drifting out from open windows: “In the summertime when the weather is hot; You can stretch right up and touch the sky; When the weather’s fine, you got sneezing, you got sneezing on your mind.”

Some eagle eyed readers may think that the word sneezing is actually supposed to be women but they have clearly not experienced this week like most of us have.

While thousands basked in the sunshine, getting the tan on to a quite worrying level of orange, the rest of us spent every four seconds achooing.

Not just your normal ‘achoo’, I mean the kind of wall-shaking achoo that causes your cat to leap out of its skin.

Once you start of course, you can’t stop. Not in a dancing all night long to Lionel Richie kind of way, but a ‘please Donald Trump, press the button and put me out of my misery before yet more snot hurtles across the room and lands on my already petrified cat’ kind of way.

This situation is amplified when you have the pleasure of sharing your company with others. You could be at work or out for lunch with friends when the sneezing fit will begin. Naturally you let out a small one to start and you get the sympathetic smiles and the ‘aww bless you’. Then four seconds later you feel your nose twitching again. You cannot possibly sneeze that quickly straight away or you will be judged horribly. You hold it in. The next one? Hold it in. Eventually you hold so many in you cannot hold another and you let rip an earth shuddering sneeze. In the office the computers shut down, when out for lunch the tea cups crack.

Your friends look at you like you’ve just come into their house on Christmas day and robbed the turkey. They’ve sussed you, they know you have got the modern day version of the plague – hayfever.

But that’s not the end of the horror show, some smug so-and-so in the group will pipe up and ask: “Oh that hayfever sounds bad, have you tried taking an antihistamine?”

“Well, do you know what, I had never thought of that. Thank you so much I’ll pop to Boots (other shops are available) and get some now,” comes the reply.

If translated, your real response contains so many swear words it would outdo Gordon Ramsay in a kitchen with an uncooked chicken,

But the misery does not end there, oh no no no. Hayfever is not your hit-and-run kind of plague, it has its lingering after-affects.

You have learnt your lesson from losing all your friends and being forced to work in isolation, regardless of having taken an antihistamine in the morning you must carry spares with you in case the pollen count decides to wreak havoc.

Unfortunately the lesson has been learnt way too late.

The next morning you wake up and your snotty, squidgy nose has turned into pure crust. Your throat? Drier than the Sahara.

People think man flu is bad but the after-affects of hayfever are potentially life-threatening.

The thing is though it isn’t, we seem to relish massively over-egging our minor illnesses.

And yet the amazing thing is that when something serious does come round, we play it right down.

Symptoms: Leg broken in half

What you should say: “I am in serious pain and I am not OK, my leg is broken.”

You’ll most likely say: “I am sure it is fine, honestly, probably just a bruise.”

Maybe if we all spent more time paying attention in our psychology lessons instead of laughing at Sigmund Freud fancying his mum then we might be able to provide an answer as to why we behave like this.

Instead, much like how doctors must feel on a daily basis, we’re left dumbfounded and having to put up with people’s moaning over common colds and a spot of hayfever.

It must be great being a doctor, you battle your way through six years of university, getting a night out once every year while your friends are out every night – and your reward? That pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? It’s some curly-haired Jonah Hill lookalike sat in front of you telling you how he thinks he might die because he has food poisoning and cannot keep any water down.

“How will I survive without water?” Jonah wails, as the despairing doctor reaches for paracetamol in one hand and his P45 in another.

Maybe we should all do doctors a favour and just be honest about how we are feeling about our health.

More importantly maybe we should do ourselves a favour and be honest. People often lose their lives because when they are seriously ill they pretend they aren’t and miss the chance to get help.

The same applies to mental health, people pretend they are fine and bury their feelings until it is too late.

The open and honest approach might just stop a few doctors having mental breakdowns and save a few lives in the process.

Anyway now that is settled, a trip to the doctors is in order as it’s suddenly dawned on Jonah that if this sneezing continues like this, he could be losing vital liquids from his body and might die.

Achoo.