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"I can't believe you like to eat sushi and you have OCD," my boyfriend said, over dinner at a Japanese restaurant recently. He had a point: with my concerns about germs and disease, raw fish should be one of the last things I want on my plate.

I admit, things are better now, partly because I no longer watch so much sensationalized television news with its constant coverage of terrorism. Post-9/11, I found it much harder to argue with myself about why that powder on the doorknob of the post office was probably not anthrax, or about how I could probably not catch a disease from a stain on a table that looked vaguely like dried blood. But I also credit the improvement to a job I once took in a pet shop, which I learned to love - mites and all.

As it turned out, this job was more than pocket money for me. It was exposure therapy. I became one of them - one of the millions of people who change bedding, dispense pellets, and speak in baby-talk to a fluffy creature. Laugh if you want, but birds have probably done more for the treatment of my OCD than any other therapy.

Desensitization, or exposure therapy - also known as living hell - involves forcing someone with OCD to physically confront the source of their worry. In high school psychology class, I saw a video of a woman with OCD being given a dead mouse to hold. I could easily imagine her terror. "That's terrible", I thought. "It's ridiculous. If anyone told me not to wash my hands after having a complete stranger sneeze on them, I would punch him in the face and hope some of those pathogens got stuck in his nose. There must be a better way." I had no idea that desensitization could be gradual or, rather, that I could do it myself, completely by accident.

At the pet shop, I took a liking to the few exotic parrots we had for sale. Their plumage, their songs, their intelligence - I just couldn't stay away. Needless to say, birds have very fast metabolisms, and what goes in comes out very quickly. I thought I would panic at having the occasional streak of droppings across my shapeless green tunic, but I found I was too busy paying attention to the bird on my arm to really care. In fact, I reckon I was more concerned about the germs on the money I touched at the till than about those on the birds, dogs and cats I constantly handled.

It wasn't always easy. One day I had the misfortune to find a dead guinea pig, long past rigor mortis, underneath a stack of dog dishes in the stock room. I flew across the room, screaming, and spent the rest of the day jumping at the slightest touch. And then there was the infirmary, a tiny room of cages and heat lamps where ill animals would go to recover. That's where I met Nebbish, the only bird more neurotic than myself.

Nebbish was unsellable. No matter how bright his feathers were, nobody wanted a canary that wouldn't sing, couldn't fly, and underwent moults that would leave him with a bald head. He spent most of his time slouched in the corner of his cage, reacting to humans with a glare and a groan of "Meeeeeh". The store had consulted multiple vets, none of whom had the slightest idea what to do with him. So Nebbish sat in the windowless infirmary, baking himself under a heat lamp.

I immediately bonded with the bird, gradually reaching into his cage to introduce him to the concept of being handled. After a few months, realizing that you can't keep birds of a feather apart, my boss allowed me to take Nebbish for free. I reckon they wrote "died" on the inventory sheet when they logged his departure.

The good news was that my science teacher at school had given me permission to keep Nebbish in a corner of the lab, and the partnership of weird science was complete: obsessive-compulsive student and neurotic bird (plus an astronomy teacher who just so happened to have lost her sight in a plane crash).

Soon Nebbish had a devoted group of fans who popped into the lab to visit every day. And then the impossible happened: Nebbish whistled. Nebbish flew. I cleaned the cage.

Nebbish the therapy bird reigned until my graduation, when I brought him home. My parents took a photo of me in my graduation gown with Nebbish clutched in my hands. His color matched the outfit.

Sadly, Nebbish died of unknown causes not much later, but by then I had two budgies whose cage sat right beside my bed. A few months earlier I would have obsessed about inhaling particles of contaminated dust - now I couldn't wait to wake up to their songs. I had spent months alongside these creatures at the shop with no harm done, after all.

When I moved to New York for university, pets were prohibited, so as a surrogate for the budgies I chased pigeons. Now, the common city pigeon is not exactly a pet parrot - these rats with wings have waddled through dirty puddles (Meningitis risk?), pecked at anything remotely edible (Salmonella?) and are generally maligned as carriers of disease. Why on Earth would I want them anywhere near me?

I don't know. I could be crazy. Quite a few people may think I am. But when I put on a pigeon show in the middle of campus for prospective students, the birds stacked atop each other in pursuit of the seed I hold in my palm, I remind myself that I will wash my hands with soap six times once the act is complete. And I do.

I've still got OCD, but now, thanks to the birds, I have learned to enjoy playing in the dirt.