About two weeks ago I had an allergic reaction to my migraine medicine. This was a sample med and I had never taken it before. Unfortunately, it had an ingredient in it that as an adult I have suddenly become allergic to when taken with a few other things. These items are: caffeine, the perfect timing between caffeine and said ingedient, and a mysterious third ingedient to be determined.

I took this medicine as I was supposed to go to work and I had a migraine. After about 20 minutes, my lips felt hot and tingly. This is the first sign of my allergic reactions. I went into the bathroom and they were starting to swell. I grabbed some anti-histamines, took them, and prayed. I prayed that they would do the trick so that my throat wouldn’t swell too much resulting in the use of my stab-me-pen (EpiPen). It worked well enough, but I spent the whole day on the couch with a puffy face and puffy lips constantly dosing myself with anti-histamines.

Finally at about 4:30 I decided that I should get some fresh air hoping it would make me feel better. Thus my fishing guide and I decided to go catfishing nearby as we are in a contest to catch the largest catfish. (It should be noted that I was supposed to work until at least 5PM so that the earliest I could have gotten home was 6PM. Therefore, going fishing this early would definitely not have been an option).

We got to the river at about 5PM and set ourselves up. At about 5:30, my fishing guide had a bite. He asked if I wanted it and I said it was his fish. He set the hook and asked again cause it was surely a cat (catfish). I said OK and started to reel in. It was my first catfish! We grabbed the measuring tape and it was 23×13 inches. Not too shabby!

 It was a bit hard to hold this creature down and I was not about to stick my hand in its mouth like some people do. Only a few moments later did my line go off and I grabbed my rod and started to reel in again. This one was smaller (23×10.5in) but put up more of a fight which is always fun.

 Both of these catfish were on the brown color scheme. I had never caught a catfish before this day and now I reeled in two and can definitely say one was all mine. Every other time before this when I would go catfishing I would catch carp, so I was ecstatic that I could finally put some entries in this contest.

About 30 minutes later, my line went off again. My rod almost went into the water before I could grab it. I did catch it and my line started taking off. I learned early to let it go a bit before you start fighting back but it almost took all my line off my spool completely! I started fighting it towards shore and it was a slow and tiring process. This fish would not give up. Finally I got it to shore and we, the fish and I, were both exhausted. This one was 27x15in! The biggest cat of the day and I was so proud to call myself “Queen of the Cats” for this day.

This fish was more silver and blue in color and I thought it was beautiful. It should be noted that the contest is a catch and release contest, so all of these fish were released back into the river and swam away happily (well happy to get away). All three of these fish put me in 23rd place at the time for channel catfish. I was thrilled considering I had never caught one before this day.

This day started off horribly. Having an allergic reaction is horrible, especially one that affects your mouth and throat area. If I had not had this happen to me, however, I would not have caught these three fish as I would have been working and missed my window of opportunity (we didn’t catch any fish later in the evening).

Sometimes it is hard to see how anything good can come from something bad. Sometimes it is hard to find the silver lining. In this case though I did. I found the silver lining and it came in the form of a big silver catfish.