I have always been allergic to cats.

There hasn't been a time when I've been able to spend a great amount of time with cats in the room, or in places where cats spent a lot of time. But in the last few years, many of my friends have gotten cats, and I've had a revelation: Cats are pretty cool.

When I was a kid, I never got close to them. I was afraid of them, really. Dogs to a lesser extent--but that mostly came from their bark than from any medical situation. But cats, I just stayed away from. Didn't want anything to do with them. Didn't want to look at them.

Allergies are funny. They affect people in different ways. For me, most of my allergies are airborne and thus cause me to have a hard time breathing. If it gets bad enough, I could eventually have my throat and nose and everything close up so much (as my body tries to protect itself against whatever is attacking it) that I could die.

The worst case of this came in my last semester of college. My brother and I had been kicked out of a house (long story), and we had a week before we could get into a new apartment, so we crashed on friend's floors while our stuff was crammed into storage or spare rooms.

My brother stayed at an apartment with a couple cats, a dog, a snake, a ferret and a few fish. I took up residence with a friend who had just moved into a new apartment and had gotten a couple of kittens. I thought it would be alright because the newness of the situation would protected the place from being saturated in cat-ness so I could sleep there for a week without problems.

I was wrong.

About halfway through the first night, I had to take a long walk. And then after a couple hours of trying to sleep, I had to get out of the apartment and hang out at a 24-hour restaurant for a few hours. When I got up for class, I had to pop so many decongestants (on top of the antihistamines I'd thrown down during the night) that I walked around campus in a haze. Lack of sleep and too much medicine made me a zombie, and I ended up spending most of the week on another friend's dorm room floor. Even though it was uncomfortable, at least I could breathe. This kept me away from cats for a really long time.

But when a friend came up with a litter of kittens a few months back, I began to think about this whole allergy thing. I'd been hanging out at cat-infested homes and apartments a lot in the last few years and even got to a point where some of them didn't bother me much for large blocks of time. Sure I had to take Sudafed before I went over, but mostly I was okay. I certainly wasn't dying.

Maybe allergies were like drinking alcohol. The more you learn how to drink, the more you can. Your tolerance gets better. Your body adjusts. It was all mind over matter, I thought. So when the kittens got big enough to take, my brother and I decided to take the plunge. We took one home.

Immediately there was a change, but I thought I just had to believe that I'd get used to it all. Mind over matter, baby. Mind over matter.

And I tried, because the little cat was so cool. After freaking out for a while about being in a new place, it began to explore and learn. It darted from room to room, attacked renegade insects better than any commercial exterminator, and, in general, was very fun to hang around. Being in the house for hours while we were at work gave it enough time to conserve its energy. And when I got home it was all over the place, but mostly it wanted to hang out with us. Get to know the new owners.

Gradually, though, I got sick. I couldn't stay in the living room for more than a few hours without consulting the medical cabinet. I was going through Kleenex like, well, I used a lot of Kleenex. And then, after a few days of restless sleep, a bit too much to drink and lots of other things, I started throwing up. At first I blamed it on drinking (and I'm sure this started it, the bachelor party I was at had a flowing keg and I indulged). But I just kept throwing up. For about 12 hours. By the end, I saw what was at the bottom of my stomach--a ton of mucus. My body's way of saying, "Look what you're doing, man. Look what I have to do to compensate." And to top that off, I woke up Friday morning with hives (large red spots) on my arms and legs.

I rarely get hives. And it scared me. And I had to stop it all and get better. The cat, no matter how cool and fun, had to go. I couldn't be so sick that I could hardly move just to prove that I could live with a cat. So Friday night, the cat left.

I miss the cat. Saturday I kept looking around, not because I thought it was going to come back, but because I thought, well, maybe it's still here. But I knew it was gone. I could breathe again. I could hang out in the living room and not have to run for Kleenex.

So I learned two things. One, I couldn't overcome my allergy enough to live with a cat. And two, I really like cats.

Matt Worley loves to discover new paradoxes of life from time to time.