DBNull and null

I am deeply frustrated at this point in time. The reason is because I have been spending the last 30 minutes hung over a very careless mistake. C# has the coalesce operator that allows you to write code that looks neater when you are doing complex stuff like LINQ. The problem looked something like this - I had to read a couple of rows from the database and convert those data as properties on an object.
the code would look something like this:

object x;
int value;
if (x == null)
  value = -1; // default value
else
value = (int)x;

The coalesce operator allows you to make the code more concise by saying

int value = x ?? -1;// less code = less maintainence

but whilst reading data from a database table, if a particular cell is a null value, it is not read as a null but it is read as a System.DBNull. So, the freaking row[field] read was getting read as a DBNull. Once I noticed that this was the problem,  I coul;d fix the code, but the fix was less elegant.
More edits on this post when I find more about it.

[Edit 1]

Found this related question on Stackoverflow [here]