When the lungs speak

🤍

I didn’t lose to weakness.
I lost to my lungs.
And strangely… they won my life.

Putting yourself first hurts.
Nobody really prepares you for that part.

I never grew up with cats. When I tried to adopt one years ago, my body reacted violently. Back then, I was living with my mother and siblings, we had a dog, and love alone wasn’t enough. I had to give the cat up for rehoming. My circumstances weren’t right, and my body rejected the idea completely.

When I visited houses with cats, I would sneeze endlessly, but it didn’t matter. I was just visiting. You can tolerate almost anything when it’s temporary.

A few years ago, we moved to a place where cats already existed. Semi-wild ones. They had lived inside the house before we arrived. Because of my allergy, we let them live outside.

Until winter came.
And one of them got sick.

Gandalf.
A grey cat with spots, the sweetest soul you can imagine.

We brought her inside.

And then it felt unfair to leave the others out. So Hello Kitty, the little white one, came in too. Then Claudette, the black one.

Love doesn’t negotiate well with biology.

I started sneezing. My health slowly, quietly declined. So gradually that I didn’t even connect the dots. My mother warned me over the phone — be careful, the cats — and I ignored her. Completely.

Until February 13th.

I remember the date perfectly because I spent Valentine’s Day in the hospital.

My system collapsed. My lungs were on the edge of giving up. If it hadn’t been for my aunt insisting on the phone while I was struggling to breathe, I might have waited longer. And the story might have ended very differently.

After emergency care, specialists, exams, and disbelief, I left with a diagnosis: allergic asthma.

Yes.
Me.
Over forty.
The one who always prided herself on being “super healthy”.

And a lifelong medical treatment.

Even then… we kept the cats inside.

My body is wise. Patient. Loving.
It resisted.
And resisted.
And resisted.

Until today.

Today, it said: no more.

Not gently.
Not politely.
At the point of collapse, it forced me to choose.

I couldn’t breathe. I was severely congested, deep in it. I spoke to my mother again. This time she was firm: the cats have to live outside. No more pretending.

Who was I trying to fool?
I’ve been allergic my whole life. Affirmations, emotional work, spiritual bypassing — I tried. With love. With hope. But biology didn’t budge.

I spoke to my husband. I said to him that the cats had to live outside permanently or I wouldn’t be able to be here for long.
He said yes.

And something inside me shattered.

I started crying uncontrollably. A panic attack took over. I lost my breath. Hyperventilation. Total collapse.

Everything felt wrong.

But it wasn’t.

What happened wasn’t failure.
It was too much, all at once.

It wasn’t my lungs in that moment — it was panic. And panic feels exactly like dying. Cruel like that.

Here’s the truth I needed to hear:

My allergy is not a spiritual failure.
My immune system is not a test of consciousness.
Biology is not an exam of worthiness.

What broke me wasn’t “getting rid of the cats”. (By this I mean to make them live outside -they were ferals- but we still care for them, feed them, shelter them, love them etc).

It was the grief.

Accepting a limit.
Letting go of something I love.
Feeling like I was losing.
And carrying the guilt of needing to save myself.

That is grief. And my body experienced it as a threat.

My husband did something important, even though it hurt.

He chose me.
Alive.
Breathing.

And that forced me to face the hardest wound of all:

Choosing myself.

The crisis doesn’t mean the decision was wrong.
It means I touched a deep, ancient wound — the one where choosing yourself feels like losing everything.

But maybe…
It’s not losing.

Maybe it’s the first real act of care.

Note for your tranquility and mine: we live in the countryside, and the cats have plenty of space to roam around safely and also a few places where they can shelter and sleep comfortably.