No Tubes for You!

When he had the big hairy operation two weeks ago, my cat Panther left the hospital with a kind of souvenir: a tube coming out of his kidney, capped off and wrapped to his body with a big bandage like a tube top. Yesterday they checked him out with ultrasound and blood work and radioactive dyes and all sorts of fun stuff, and if all was going well they would send him home again, more or less fixed.

While all this was happening I walked around the University of Pennsylvania campus. I heard a helicopter, wondered why I was always hearing helicopters down that way, and then slapped my head: the medical school hospital. I watched the chopper come wallowing in toward the hospital roof, like a flying pachyderm, bellowing through the air. I thought of my camera too late, sorry. But it was very impressive to see, and a few other people stopped to watch.

I walked around more, browsing the campus bookstore for a while. I was determined not to be overoptimistic. I was too optimistic last time and when I found out the cat was at death's door it was rather a letdown. So I walked around. At one point, about 45 minutes after the chopper, I realized that I'd watched the damn thing, saying "cool" to myself, without giving one particle of thought to the desperately ill occupant. I didn't feel overly callous about it, but it did strike me.

I walked, I talked to other pet owners in the waiting room, I did some work on my laptop, I went out into the car to read. (It was Big Loud Dog Morning, evidently.) And finally the vet who's directing Panther's care came down. All the indicators were great, so they pulled the tube, wrapped him up with a temporary bandage I could take off that evening, and sent him home.

So home we went. It's not a question of joyful backflips or anything. I've been holding myself in too much. But he's home, and healthy, and some very skillful people are determined to keep him that way or know the reason why. The evening came, and I tried to take the bandage off. He let me unwrap it a little, but when I tried to continue unwrapping it under his belly he got antsy. He doesn't like having bandages on, but he's very fussy about when you try to take them off. You'd think he'd cooperate, but that's not how cats think. He started wriggling, and finally broke loose and made a dash for it. I reflexively held on to the bandage and it unspooled as he leapt, like fishing line off a spinning reel. I was holding it in my hand, a few feet of blue plastic and white cotton, and the cat was off in the closet, waiting for the trouble to die down. And that was it. No more bandages on him, just his black fur, and a particularly scary chapter of his story over, just like that.