Cats on a plane, revisited

A few details had been lost along the way: About ten years ago, Jodi was flying from Boston to her then job in San Francisco. Along with a pediatric resident from Children’s Hospital Boston, she answered the distressed call of teenagers who had chosen a cross-country flight for their house-cats’ first real world outing and had medicated them with Librium (an anxiety medication in the same drug class as Xanax and Ativan) to withstand the journey. The pediatric resident wouldn’t give up on the cat that had already died, so Jodi had to physically pull him off to focus on the one with a fighting chance. They did, in fact, place a breathing tube in the second cat before connecting with an on-ground veterinarian who guided them on cat-appropriate treatment to reverse Librium’s effects. Cat number two survived.