"Astrid."
"Joe. Go."
He went. He'd heard, in three sentences, that the version of me he was looking at was the version that worked on a cat, and that version didn't have a free hand for the man at the table.
Marisol came through the back door with her hair already tied up.
"What've we got?"
"Twelve-year-old male tabby, blocked since the night. Belly's tight. He's flat. I need a blood gas, a line, and the cath tray. We're going to sedate. Tell Joanne to push the eight-fifteen."
"On it."
She moved.
The next forty minutes were the forty minutes I'd done a hundred times in school and a hundred times in the brownstone basement clinic the summer I moonlighted for the woman in Brookline. The blood gas came back at six point nine. The potassium was high enough to stop a heart and not yet high enough to have stopped this one. I ran fluids first, then calcium gluconate slow on a second line while Marisol set up the catheter tray. The sedation was light—the cat was already three-quarters out of the metabolic state, and a heavy dose would have been the end.
I passed the catheter. The first inch was the inch a junior vet could do. The next inch was the inch a junior vet couldn't. The inch after that was the inch I'd spent six hundred hours of school and five years of practice learning. The flush went through onthe third try. The urine came back the wrong color—the color it came back when a bladder had been holding for ten hours, and the cat had been straining against it for eight.
I taped the catheter in place. I watched the bag fill. I watched his chest.
The breath came in. The breath went out. The breath came in again, and the second one belonged to a cat whose body had remembered what the air was for. The bag at the end of the line filled at the rate it was supposed to, slow and steady, and the flat panic that had been sitting in the back of my head since seven-twenty-one started to lift.
Marisol caught my eye across the table. She didn't say anything. She gave me the small nod a tech gives a vet at a moment like that one. We got him.
I sat down on the floor of the exam room. I hadn't been planning on it. My legs decided for me. I sat with my back against the cabinet under the counter, knees up, and pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes for a count of three.
"You good, Doc?"
"I'm good."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm good, Mari."
She nodded her head toward Marjorie. "He's good, too."
"Yeah."
I sat there another beat. I took my hands off my eyes. I got up off the floor.
I went out to the waiting room.
Joe Caldwell was on the bench by the window. Elbows on his knees. Hands clasped in front of him. The coffee Marisol brought was on the side table, untouched.
He looked up when I came through the door.
"Joe."
"Astrid."
"He's good. He's stable. The catheter is in. His potassium was at six point nine on the gas—high enough that he would have gone in another hour or two—and I've got him on fluids and calcium, and he's coming down. I want to keep the catheter in for forty-eight hours and run him on fluids the whole time. I'd like to keep him overnight tonight and tomorrow night. I want to recheck the gas at six tonight. He's good, Joe. You got him here on time."
He closed his eyes.
He kept them closed for a count of five.
When he opened them, the rims were wet. He didn't let it pass the rims. He took his glasses off—the small wire-frame readers he'd been wearing on his porch the night he came to mine—wiped the lenses on his shirt, and put them back on.
