No cats for me!

Well it turns out I'm very allergic to cats.  I kind of always suspected I was.  I owned a cat for a few years, and during that time I noticed I was chronically congested and often had crazy fits of sneezing. I ended up giving her back to my brother (he was her original owner), and after that I didn't have much contact with cats.

Fast-forward 5 years later... Shane and I flew into Sicily to visit our friends Michael & Lindsay.  They own a cat, Wonky.  Like most cats, she has places she likes to lounge in their house.  One of those places is the bed in the guest room.  When we got to our friends' house, we were so tired we immediately fell into the bed exhausted.  Within minutes of laying my head down on the pillow, I started to have a coughing fit.  My eyes were red and itchy, and I had several thundering sneezes.  Not anything too significant, but then... my throat started to feel itchy and tight.  As a doctor, I started to run through my symptoms in my head.  Immediate onset of symptoms after entering a room filled with cat dander.  Respiratory involvement, possibly some swelling of the upper airway.  I didn't feel like I was in full-blown anaphylaxis, but wasn't sure if I might be heading that direction.

After taking 50 mg of Benadryl and waiting an hour, and still no improvement in my throat symptoms, I decided it would probably be best to go to the ER.  Better safe than sorry.  Of course, by the time I got there I was already feeling better (probably just getting away from the cat dander helped).  They put me on steroids and sent me home with an Epi-pen, which made me feel better to have just in case.  We changed the sheets on the guest bed and covered the pillows in bags, and I slept pretty well the rest of the night.

Moral of the story: no cats for me.  Too bad, Bonnie really wanted a playmate.   :(

The culprit.

"Who, me?  But I'm so sweet!"