Bad cold or huge allergies?

Ever since we came back from Europe in June, we believe that we’ve been plagued with allergies. We spent a lot of time in our garden while the air has been unusually dry and dusty (we only received 6 hours of rain in two month) and our discomfort which share the same symptoms as a severe cold has come and gone with alarming regularity. Aside from taking anti-histamines we haven’t found yet a durable solution to the problem. Yesterday, the pollen count for chenopods (the chenopod/amaranth family of weeds includes pigweed, Russian thistle, iodine bush, lambs quarters, scale, greasewood, burning bush) had never been as high and to add insult to injury, the day before that I shoveled a few cubic yards of super-dry bark and dirt creating a dust cloud that almost choked me. The net result was that I had to go to bed for a while and really felt weak and terrible the rest of the entire day. We haven’t seen a doctor yet to determine if this is allergies or not, but it doesn’t feel quite like a cold, so for the moment, we’re fighting it as if it were an overreaction of our immune system. Let’s hope that the medication will work and today will bring some improvement!