PetKnows

This hilarious “tail” was forwarded to me by my dearest sister, Katie. I couldn’t help but share… And, for those doubting Thomases out there - this was verified as true by Snopes.com

Please note: Read at your own discretion though - your laughter may disturb those around you.

Thanks to Hans Last for the Flickr photo!

Rudy the Cat
By: Patti Schroeder

This is the story of the night my ten-year-old cat, Rudy, got his head
stuck in the garbage disposal. I knew at the time that the experience
would be funny if the cat survived, so let me tell you right up front
that he’s fine. Getting him out wasn’t easy, though, and the process
included numerous home remedies, a plumber, two cops, an emergency
overnight veterinary clinic, a case of mistaken identity, five hours
of panic, and fifteen minutes of fame.

First, some background. My husband, Rich, and I had just returned from
a five-day spring-break vacation in the Cayman Islands, where I had
been sick as a dog the whole time, trying to convince myself that if I
had to feel lousy, it was better to do it in paradise. We had arrived
home at 9 p.m., a day and a half later than we had planned because of
airline problems. I still had illness-related vertigo and because of
the flight delays had not been able to prepare the class I was
supposed to teach at 8:40 the next morning. I sat down at my desk to
think about William Carlos Williams, and around ten o’clock I heard
Rich hollering something indecipherable from the kitchen. As I raced
out to see what was wrong, I saw Rich frantically rooting around under
the kitchen sink, and Rudy — or, rather, Rudy’s headless body —
scrambling around in the sink, his claws clicking in panic on the
metal. Rich had just ground up the skin of some smoked salmon in the
garbage disposal, and when he left the room, Rudy (whom we always did
call a pinhead) had gone in after it.

It is very disturbing to see the headless body of your cat in the
sink. This is an animal that I have slept with nightly for ten years,
who burrows under the covers and purrs against my side, and who now
looked like a desperate, fur-covered turkey carcass, set to defrost in
the sink while it’s still alive and kicking. It was also disturbing to
see Rich, Mr. Calm-in-an-Emergency, at his wits end, trying to soothe
Rudy, trying to undo the garbage disposal, failing at both, and
basically freaking out. Adding to the chaos was Rudy’s twin brother
Lowell, also upset, racing around in circles, jumping onto the kitchen
counter and alternately licking Rudy’s butt for comfort and biting it
out of fear. Clearly, I had to do something.

First we tried to ease Rudy out of the disposal by lubricating his
head and neck. We tried Johnson’s baby shampoo (kept on hand for my
nieces’ visits) and butter-flavored Crisco: both failed, and a
now-greasy Rudy kept struggling. Rich then decided to take apart the
garbage disposal, which was a good idea, but he couldn’t do it. Turns
out, the thing is constructed like a metal onion: you peel off one
layer and another one appears, with Rudy’s head still buried deep
inside, stuck in a hard plastic collar. My job during this process was
to sit on the kitchen counter petting Rudy, trying to calm him, with
the room spinning (vertigo), Lowell howling (he’s part Siamese), and
Rich clattering around with tools.

When all our efforts failed, we sought professional help. I called our
regular plumber, who actually called me back quickly, even at 11
o’clock at night (thanks, Dave). He talked Rich through further layers
of disposal dismantling, but still we couldn’t reach Rudy. I called
the 1-800 number for Insinkerator (no response), a pest removal
service that advertises 24-hour service (no response), an all-night
emergency veterinary clinic (who had no experience in this matter, and
so, no advice), and finally, in desperation, 911. I could see that
Rudy’s normally pink paw pads were turning blue. The fire department,
I figured, gets cats out of trees; maybe they could get one out of a
garbage disposal.

The dispatcher had other ideas and offered to send over two policemen.
This suggestion gave me pause. I’m from the sixties, and even if I am
currently a fine upstanding citizen, I had never considered calling
the cops and asking them to come to my house, on purpose. I resisted
the suggestion, but the dispatcher was adamant: “They’ll help you
out,” he said.

The cops arrived close to midnight and turned out to be quite nice.
More importantly, they were also able to think rationally, which we
were not. They were, of course, quite astonished by the situation:
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Officer Mike kept saying. (The
unusual circumstances helped us get quickly on a first-name basis with
our cops.) Officer Tom, who expressed immediate sympathy for our
plight — “I’ve had cats all my life,” he said, comfortingly — also had
an idea. Evidently we needed a certain tool, a tiny, circular rotating
saw, that could cut through the heavy plastic flange encircling Rudy’s
neck without hurting Rudy, and Officer Tom happened to own one. “I
live just five minutes from here,” he said; “I’ll go get it.” He soon
returned, and the three of them — Rich and the two policemen — got
under the sink together to cut through the garbage disposal. I sat on
the counter, holding Rudy and trying not to succumb to the
surreal-ness of the scene, with the weird middle-of-the-night
lighting, the room’s occasional spinning, Lowell’s spooky sound
effects, an apparently headless cat in my sink and six disembodied
legs poking out from under it. One good thing came of this: the guys
did manage to get the bottom off of the disposal, so we could now see
Rudy’s face and knew he could breathe. But they couldn’t cut the
flange without risking the cat. Stumped.

Officer Tom had another idea. “You know,” he said, “I think the reason
we can’t get him out is the angle of his head and body. If we could
just get the sink out and lay it on its side, Ill bet we could slip
him out.” That sounded like a good idea at this point. ANYTHING would
have sounded like a good idea, and as it turned out, Officer Mike runs
a plumbing business on weekends; he knew how to take out the sink!
Again they went to work, the three pairs of legs sticking out from
under the sink surrounded by an ever-increasing pile of tools and sink
parts. They cut the electrical supply, capped off the plumbing lines,
unfastened the metal clamps, unscrewed all the pipes, and about an
hour later, voila! the sink was lifted gently out of the countertop,
with one guy holding the garbage disposal (which contained Rudy’s
head) up close to the sink (which contained Rudy’s body). We laid the
sink on its side, but even at this more favorable removal angle, Rudy
stayed stuck.

Officer Tom’s radio beeped, calling him away on some kind of real
police business. As he was leaving, though, he had another good idea:
“You know,” he said, “I don’t think we can get him out while he’s
struggling so much. We need to get the cat sedated. If he were limp,
we could slide him out.” And off he went, regretfully, a cat lover
still worried about Rudy. The remaining three of us decided that
getting Rudy sedated was a good idea, but Rich and I were new to the
area. We knew that the overnight emergency veterinary clinic was only
a few minutes away, but we didn’t know exactly how to get there. “I
know where it is!” declared Officer Mike. “Follow me!” So Mike got
into his patrol car, Rich got into the driver’s seat of our car, and I
got into the back, carrying the kitchen sink, what was left of the
garbage disposal, and Rudy. It was now about 2:00 a.m. We followed
Officer Mike for a few blocks when I decided to put my hand into the
garbage disposal to pet Rudy’s face, hoping I could comfort him.
Instead, my sweet, gentle bedfellow chomped down on my finger hard,
really hard, and wouldn’t let go. My scream reflex kicked into gear,
and I couldn’t stop the noise. Rich slammed on the brakes, hollering
“What? What happened? Should I stop?”, checking us out in the rearview
mirror. “No,” I managed to get out between screams, “just keep
driving. Rudy’s biting me, but we’ve got to get to the vet. Just go!”
Rich turned his attention back to the road, where Officer Mike took a
turn we hadn’t expected, and we followed. After a few minutes Rudy let
go, and as I stopped screaming, I looked up to discover that we were
wandering aimlessly through an industrial park, in and out of empty
parking lots, past little streets that didn’t look at all familiar.
“Where’s he taking us?” I asked. “We should have been there ten
minutes ago!” Rich was as mystified as I was, but all we knew to do
was follow the police car until, finally, he pulled into a church
parking lot and we pulled up next to him. As Rich rolled down the
window to ask, “Mike, where are we going?”, the cop, who was not Mike,
rolled down his window and asked, “Why are you following me?” Once
Rich and I recovered from our shock at having tailed the wrong cop car
and the policeman from his pique at being stalked, he led us quickly
to the emergency vet, where Mike greeted us by holding open the door,
exclaiming “Where were you guys???”

It was lucky that Mike got to the vet’s ahead of us, because we hadn’t
thought to call and warn them about what was coming. (Clearly, by this
time we weren’t really thinking at all.) We brought in the kitchen
sink containing Rudy and the garbage disposal containing his head, and
the clinic staff was ready. They took his temperature (which was down
10 degrees) and his oxygen level (which was half of normal), and the
vet declared: “This cat is in serious shock. We’ve got to sedate him
and get him out of there immediately.” When I asked if it was OK to
sedate a cat in shock, the vet said grimly, “We don’t have a choice.”
With that, he injected the cat; Rudy went limp; and the vet squeezed
about half a tube of K-Y jelly onto the cat’s neck and pulled him
free. Then the whole team jumped into “code blue” mode. (I know this
from watching a lot of ER.) They laid Rudy on a cart, where one person
hooked up IV fluids, another put little socks on his paws (”You’d be
amazed how much heat they lose through their pads,” she said), one
covered him with hot water bottles and a blanket, and another took a
blow-dryer to warm up Rudy’s now very gunky head. The fur on his head
dried in stiff little spikes, making him look rather pathetically punk
as he lay there, limp and motionless. At this point they sent Rich,
Mike, and me to sit in the waiting room while they tried to bring Rudy
back to life. I told Mike he didn’t have to stay, but he just stood
there, shaking his head. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said
again. At about 3 a.m, the vet came in to tell us that the prognosis
was good for a full recovery. They needed to keep Rudy overnight to
re-hydrate him and give him something for the brain swelling they
assumed he had, but if all went well, we could take him home the
following night. Just in time to hear the good news, Officer Tom
rushed in, finished with his real police work and concerned about
Rudy. I figured that once this ordeal was over and Rudy was home
safely, I would have to re-think my position on the police.

Rich and I got back home about 3:30. We hadn’t unpacked from our trip,
I was still intermittently dizzy, and I still hadn’t prepared my 8:40
class. “I need a vacation,” I said, and while I called the office to
leave a message canceling my class, Rich made us a pitcher of martinis.

I slept late the next day and then badgered the vet about Rudy’s
condition until he said that Rudy could come home later that day. I
was working on the suitcases when the phone rang. “Hi, this is Steve
Huskey from the Norristown Times-Herald,” a voice told me. “Listen, I
was just going through the police blotter from last night. Mostly it’s
the usual stuff breaking and entering, petty theft but there’s this
one item. Um, do you have a cat?” So I told Steve the whole story,
which interested him. A couple hours later he called back to say that
his editor was interested, too; did I have a picture of Rudy? The next
day Rudy was front-page news, under the ridiculous headline “Catch of
the Day Lands Cat in Hot Water.”

There were some noteworthy repercussions to the newspaper article. Mr.
Huskey had somehow inferred that I called 911 because I thought Rich,
my husband, was going into shock, although how he concluded this from
my comment that “his pads were turning blue,” I don’t quite
understand. So the first thing I had to do was call Rich at work Rich,
who had worked tirelessly to free Rudy — and swear that I had been
misquoted. When I arrived at work myself, I was famous; people had
been calling my secretary all morning to inquire about Rudy’s health.
When I called our regular vet (whom I had met only once) to make a
follow-up appointment for Rudy, the receptionist asked, “Is this the
famous Rudy’s mother?” When I brought my car in for routine
maintenance a few days later, Dave, my mechanic, said, “We read about
your cat. Is he OK?” When I called a tree surgeon about my dying red
oak, he asked if I knew the person on that street whose cat had been
in the garbage disposal. And when I went to get my hair cut, the
shampoo person told me the funny story her grandma had read in the
paper, about a cat who got stuck in the garbage disposal. Even today,
over a year later, people ask about Rudy, whom a 9-year-old neighbor
had always called “the Adventure Cat” because he used to climb on the
roof of her house and peer in the second-story window at her.

I don’t know what the moral of this story is, but I do know that this
“adventure” cost me $1100 in emergency vet bills, follow-up vet care,
new sink, new plumbing, new electrical wiring, and new garbage
disposal, one with a cover. The vet can no longer say he’s seen
everything but the kitchen sink. I wanted to thank Officers Tom and
Mike by giving them gift certificates to the local hardware store, but
was told that they couldn’t accept gifts, that I would put them in a
bad position if I tried. So I wrote a letter to the Police Chief
praising their good deeds and sent individual thank-you notes to Tom
and Mike, complete with pictures of Rudy, so they could see what he
looks like with his head on. And Rudy, whom we originally got for free
(or so we thought), still sleeps with me under the covers on cold
nights and unaccountably, he still sometimes prowls the sink, hoping
for fish.

From: The Norristown Times-Herald