At the end of a long day I received a call from a man who said his cat was skewered by a stick. Naturally I told him to come right in and I would wait for him. He couldn’t handle the cat and asked if I would come to his house. Fortunately, I had one of our technicians available and we took a drive into a very affluent neighborhood.

The wife answered the door and directed us upstairs. We entered the master bedroom. I saw the largest bed I had ever seen. The man was standing opposite us with his back pressed to the wall wearing driving gloves. I am an optimist but on sizing up this scene it was hard to think the injured cat, wherever he was, would be easy to handle.

I asked where the cat was and he pointed to the bed. I was on one side and our technician was on the other. We both crouched down to have a look. Our feline named Sam was right in the middle of the floor under the bed. I could see the stick going in one side of his abdomen and exiting from the opposite side. His pupils were wide and reflective and he displayed a healthy set of teeth. We couldn’t reach him so I asked his owner if we could take the mattress off. He quickly said no. This was going well so far. I then asked if we could borrow a couple of large towels. I got the impression he would have liked to say no to that as well but his wife quickly got two large beach towels. In the under mattress version of a cattle drive, I crawled underneath and Sam moved into the waiting towel of our technician.

The owners followed us to the hospital where I prepared Sam to undergo emergency surgery. The surgery went great. Miraculously the stick missed all of the internal organs as it passed through the abdomen. While Sam recovered from the anesthesia I updated the owners. They in turn told me what had happened. Apparently Sam jumped from a tall ledge in their atrium and landed on a stick that was holding up a new plant. The stick snapped off and he ran under the bed. I had never met anyone that owned driving gloves but resisted my temptation to ask how they worked with a fractious cat.

Sam recovered well, I kept the stick, and I am not sure about the status of the plant.