This is nuts. When your house has become utterly toxic to you, you effectively have no house. Oh, your housemates, who own the cats, may well still have a house. But when the cat allergy negotiation quickly degenerates into unending hours of sobbing on the side of the cat stewards, and when the cat stewards outnumber the cat-aversive by a 2 to 1 margin, the allergy sufferer is essentially sh*t out of luck, as we used to say in the Old West.

So what do you do? The reality is you cannot breathe normally at "home," and therefore you only take shallow breaths and frequently step out onto the deck to fill up. You thank Bacchus for his infinitely valuable gifts. But now and then you pause to wonder: "WTF?"

The biggest problem is the medications prescribed to relieve your "symptoms" primarily succeed in allowing the deadly processes the symptoms were designed to thwart to continue unabated. Allergens flow ever more deeply into one's body, unhampered by clogged sinuses. And the results of that are impressive. Whereas the effects used to be limited to intense congestion of the breathing apparatus, now the result is a feeling of poisoning felt thoughout the system.

When a person extremely allergic to cats walks into a room full of allergens, the typical bodily response is an immediate difficulty in breathing. When said person is pumped full of steroids and antihistamines, the result is a strange, deep sense of physical discomfort, and the irritation is less in the nose than in the neck and lungs.

More significantly, there is a feeling of overwhelming annoyance. Just seeing these animals ticks you off; but when they walk in front of you and you get a dry, scratchy feeling deep in the back of the throat, like little cat hairs are tickling your brachial tubes, you have to adjust your breathing capacity downward and you REALLY begin to get annoyed.

So when you own a house that you cannot comfortably enter, what is the proper next step? For one family to own and inhabit two residences is not, as far as I can figure, financially smart. No IRS benefits there. If I move out to a motel or apartment we're just throwing money down the drain. I could secede - divorce the wife and kid and cats - but, again, that would be a pure loss financially speaking.

The one thing I know for sure is that cat allergies are serious business. From what I am gathering, the effects can get pretty ugly. When you spend two months with debilitating problems in the sinuses and nose, and then after going on medications experience equally debilitating neck and chest problems, you start thinking apocalyptic thoughts. Bacchus helps, but he's at most a lesser god if that. When you're over forty like me, you really notice the physical problems and you worry they could be harbingers of worse.

In Genesis, third chapter, God introduced the notion that He would clothe us in skins, after Adam and Eve had unsuccessfully attempted to hide their shame by sewing together fig leaves. This was the first concrete mention of animals serving a sacrificial role.

I don't want to "sacrifice" these cats. But, at the same time, I think it puts things in perspective. I've been going on seven years suffering from breathing problems and depression from the sheer irritation of being surrounded by animals to which I'm extremely allergic. The new medications of the past week have, if anything, made the problem worse because the allergens seem to be spreading more freely throughout my body.

The most simple solutions would be either I move out, or all of us buy a bigger house where we could keep the cats out in the yard or in the basement. This latter, unfortunately, would mean we move 100 miles away. The only other solutions are going to be very difficult: Send the furry creatures off to the death chamber, or spend a fortune on a bigger house here in Reston.

The animal stewards have had precious few rational solutions to offer recently, but if I was a betting man, I'd bet I'll be moving out, at least temporarily. We've put an awful lot into fixing up this little place, and, like it or not, it's absolutely toxic. I'm thinking a condo well outside the beltway will be my final landing point. The ladies will pitch in three or five hundred dollars a month extra each to keep their animals and I'll be flying solo again.

So thank you, cats, and curse you cats, and curse whoever started this sick tradition of bringing cats into the home. We'll be a one-family, multi-residence operation. Ah, the things some people will do to keep their cats.