When a kitten went missing in a family home, the family's own live-in medical expert stepped in with equipment more familiar to a hospital procedure room than a toolbox. Dr. Benjamin Seides, an interventional pulmonologist, used a borescope and surgical tools to track down and free the family's kitten after it became trapped inside a wall of their home.
Seides was at home with his family getting ready for bed when they realized their Russian blue kitten was nowhere to be found, according to NBC 5 Chicago. The outlet identifies the kitten as Neko, though a brief FOX 32 Chicago clip refers to the same cat as Nico, and the available reporting does not clarify the discrepancy.
As the search continued, the family heard a faint meow coming from the basement. That sound led them to a troubling realization: the kitten had found its way inside a wall of their home by climbing into the ceiling through an unfinished area of the basement, the station reports.
A Doctor's Toolkit Comes Home
Rather than tear into the drywall blind, Seides turned to the same instincts he relies on at the Canning Thoracic Institute at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital. After drilling a small hole in the drywall, he inserted a borescope, a slender camera that the outlet describes as working similarly to the tools physicians use to examine a patient's lungs and airways, as reported by NBC Chicago.
Seides then navigated the camera through the wall much like he would while performing an endoscopy, eventually spotting the trapped kitten inside. The approach mirrored the careful, methodical technique interventional pulmonologists use to guide instruments through narrow passageways in the body, applied instead to the narrow cavity of a home's wall.
A Careful Rescue, Then Reunion
Once he located the kitten, Seides created a hole large enough for it to crawl through. The kitten was then reunited with the rest of the family, as noted by NBC Chicago, bringing the brief but tense ordeal to a close.
The rescue stands out largely because of the overlap between Seides's day job and his impromptu home repair. The same precision and comfort navigating tight, unseen spaces that define his work as an interventional pulmonologist turned out to be exactly what was needed to bring a frightened kitten back to safety.
