Nigel: a life, mostly uneventful, interrupted once.

Before

Nigel is five. White, with a dark patch on the head and another by one eye. Somewhat overweight. For four and a half years nothing happened to him, which is the best thing that can happen to a cat and the least remarked on.

Health, like plumbing, is noticed only in its absence.

That matters. This disease favors the ordinary: male, indoor, middle-aged, slightly heavy, on dry food. Cats whose owners have never heard the words urethral obstruction.

The day

From outside: a cat being mildly odd. More trips to the box. Longer visits. Digging that wasn’t digging — squat, shuffle, squat again — then back to the box, and back again.

Still eating. Still came when called. Was it an emergency? I would have said no. I would have been wrong.

Straining looks like digging from across a room.

By the time it was obvious — hunched, crying, a hard belly — it was well advanced.

The night

The emergency clinic at night. Fluorescent light, the same at eleven as at four. Carriers on knees. How long has he been like this? Nobody had been counting. Since sometime yesterday. The clerk writes it down and moves you up the list.

Bladder: large, firm, painful. — BUN: over 130. Ceiling near 30. — IV line. Fluids. — Sedation. Catheter. Plug flushed back. — Everything in, measured. Everything out, measured. — Owner advised: several nights.

A plug of crystals and debris in a urethra that, in a male cat, is long and narrow and tapers the wrong way. The kidneys had nowhere to send their work, so they stopped doing it. BUN measures that waste. Healthy cats sit under about 30. His stayed over 130 for days. Cornell puts complete obstruction to death at possibly under 24 to 48 hours. We weren’t clever. Somebody eventually looked properly.

The medicine was excellent. The monitoring was me, asleep.

The clinical version — potassium, the catheter, the bill — is in the blocked-cat guide.

After

He came home with a diagnosis: FLUTD. Managed, not cured. It can recur. Since then: wet food, more water bowls than seem necessary, litter boxes rebuilt along these lines. As of this sentence he is asleep. The camera is running.

Why a camera

The medicine worked. The failure was upstream, in the house: nobody with a job and a bedtime can watch a litter box.

Every early sign happens at the box, in private, often at night, in about thirty seconds. Built to be missed by a person. Not by a camera — no job, no bedtime, no habit of filing things under weird. Infrared, so the room stays dark. Motion at the tray sends an email with a time on it.

No machine learning. It can’t tell a good visit from a bad one. It makes a log, which was the thing missing. The build log has the wiring.

Why public

The domain was available. More to the point, most owners have never heard that male cats block, or they see the straining and assume constipation. That mistake kills cats. The information that prevents it is rarely looked for until it is too late. So: a camera, and a reading list.

Why it reads like this

Health pages written in the usual voice get closed in seconds. A level, deadpan one keeps people reading, and a reader who keeps reading reaches the sentence about straining. The coffeehouse writers of the fifties understood this.

One rule: the voice stops where the danger starts. Emergencies are plain type, short sentences, no jokes, marked Plain text. The manifesto has the rest.

Next: more guides. Eventually something larger than one cat: FLUTD awareness, possibly a nonprofit.

Who writes this