---

About two years ago I went down into our house's cellar one day and smelled an unpleasant odor, as if a cat had marked there. On the trough of a plant that we had just put in the cellar shortly before to overwinter, I detected cat urine. I assumed that I must have brought the plant into the cellar like that without noticing the marking.
I removed all traces of the scent. But to my surprise, one or two days later I made the same discovery again. Now it became clear to me that apparently a tomcat had been marking in our cellar. You have to know that we have a cat with a cat flap in the cellar, which is not fitted with a chip or anything similar, meaning in principle any cat can get in. This had also worked without problems for years. I immediately had a suspicion as to which neighboring tomcat it might be, but for the time being we couldn't do much about it. Either we locked the flap entirely, in which case our own cat could no longer get in and out either, or we had to live with the situation for a while. I checked the cellar every day and kept cleaning everything up to get rid of the stench, while my husband also looked for a flap with a chip and fitted a collar with such a chip. From first noticing the stench (DHS) to the finished installation of the new flap (which of course wasn't the same model and required some adjustments) about three weeks passed. Perfect - our house was safe from strange cats again. What followed was a painful frontal sinusitis and the worst cold of my life. For three weeks I had a runny nose (stench conflict), at times a slight fever, coughing (fright-fear conflict) and a severe frontal headache. I really felt how my frontal sinuses were swollen shut, but since I knew what the cause was, I could trust that relief would come soon. The new cat flap also made me certain that this wouldn't happen again.