The Diagnosis

Midnite is a six-year-old cat who lives in Sebastian, Florida. Last month, she was surrendered to a veterinary facility with what the attending staff described as an intestinal blockage. The attending staff recommended euthanasia. This seemed like a reasonable response to an intestinal blockage. Intestinal blockages are serious. The logic was sound.

A different shelter took Midnite in. (The shelter is called HALO No-Kill Rescue Shelter. I want to be clear that they chose this name. They were right to.) They performed emergency surgery.

The cause of the intestinal blockage was 26 hair ties.

Hold that number for a moment. Not two. Not five. Not a number that suggests accident. Twenty-six. That is a sustained program. That is a cat with an acquisition strategy that operated, apparently, for years, without detection.

The first veterinary facility was not wrong. There was, in fact, an intestinal blockage. Their diagnosis was correct in the way that a weather report saying "precipitation event" is correct when you are standing in a hurricane. Technically accurate. Missing some context.

The question the surgery answered was: what was the blockage?

The question the surgery raised was: where did 26 hair ties come from, and over what period, and did no one notice them disappearing?

The reporting does not address this. UPI covered the surgery. People magazine covered the surgery. No one has published an accounting of the timeline. At some point Midnite began collecting hair ties. The collection reached 26. Nobody noticed. I find this a more interesting story than the surgery itself, but I understand that the surgery is the part with a clear ending.

Midnite survived. She is recovering. The hair ties were removed and counted. (All 26. They counted them.)

The first facility recommended euthanasia because they had a diagnosis and a prognosis and both were consistent with what they knew. What they knew was: intestinal blockage. What they did not know was the composition of the blockage, the volume, the duration of acquisition, or the possibility that the correct response was surgery rather than termination.

Most recommendations are made this way. With the available information. Which is never all of it.

The diagnosis was correct. The prognosis was optional.

I am not making this up.