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Almost overnight, the pollen count in Southern Arizona has exploded, sending hordes of desert dwellers into deep misery, hounding their doctors for help.

"We are hot. We are hot," is all Tucson pollen expert Mark Sneller could say by Friday.

"This happened all of a sudden — pollen took a huge jump in less than two days, with ragweed leading the charge, and that's bad news for everyone.

"People are knocked out."

They are indeed.

Among those stuck inside for the entire Easter weekend is Maria Eggers, knocked off her game Friday morning when the total pollen count spiked nearly sixfold from midweek, to 1,688.

(That's one-thousand-six-hundred-eighty-eight nasty, sneeze-inducing plant parts in every cubic meter of air.)

"I feel so sick," she said. "It's chest congestion — my lungs are tired, I can't breathe, I'm coughing, my head aches. It just gets worse and worse. My whole body hurts. And my eyes, oh my eyes. This is real bad."

Eggers, 58, has a whole medicine cabinet full of eyedrops and allergy pills, used to no avail.

"The only thing I can do is stay inside. I'm not going out there. As soon as I stick my head out the door, it's terrible," she said. "This is no way to spend Easter."

Southern Arizona was easing into its usual spring pollen season at the beginning of this month, then enjoyed a brief break last weekend, when winter's last hurrah of cold and rain tamped down pollen grains, leaving us in peace.

But as the air dried out and the temps climbed from the 50s to the 80s this past week, the whole thing went bonkers.

On Monday, the total pollen count tallied a measly 144. By Wednesday, it showed signs of life, bumping to 228. On Friday, it hit the big leagues, exploding toward 1,700.

That happens to be the good news ... well, the less bad news. The really bad news is that the mover and shaker in all this is the monster pollen-producer of them all in this desert — canyon ragweed.

Ragweed boomed from a negligible 45 on Wednesday into the 400s by Friday. And ragweed hangs on for the duration. It could be six to eight weeks before we get out of this mess.

"The big surprise is ragweed — I wasn't expecting it to take off like this," Sneller said.

"The problem is that ragweed is not like the others, the mulberry and olive trees — they go for a three-week time span. Ragweed lasts for six weeks. It just keeps on going, bridges the gaps, as the other pollens come and go.

"My concern is we're looking at high ragweed counts for some time. That will be clinically significant. We are in for a major allergy season."

"Clinically significant," in layman's terms, means people beseeching their doctors, begging for help. Now.

By midday Friday, Tucson allergy specialist Dr. George Makol was working his way through a pile of phone messages from unhappy patients, some of them desperate.

"Oh, it's happening now — the phone calls are coming in, the emergency calls are coming is," Makol said during a brief lunch break.

Two new patients checked in that morning — one who had not seen an allergist since the '70s and another who needed one for the first time ever.

"In both cases, they had to see somebody right away, today. That's how it's going now. They're suffering," he said.

It was the steady, intermittent rains throughout the winter that set the stage for our spring snotfest, by Makol's analysis.

"The key is there was no long break between rains. It would rain a few days, dry up for a week, then rain again, steadily through the months," he said.

"It's like watering your plants. It just kept the plants going, toward a full spring bloom."

As ragweed stokes the sneeze-and-wheeze index through April and into May, it will be bolstered first by blooming mulberry, followed by olive trees. After that, palo verde and mesquite will continue the torment, with grasses pitching in along the way.

The only way out of this is the heat — the searing, baking, blasting heat that moves in sometime in May and lights the furnace in June.

"Whenever the intense hot weather hits, that's when the plants finally stop pollinating," Makol said.

"I think we're looking at a minimum of two more months of this."

Unless we get lucky, and the killer heat hits early, by mid-May or sooner.

Pick your poison.