Doctor uses medical camera to rescue family’s kitten trapped inside basement wall

Well, a doctor in DuPage County pulled his family's kitten out of a basement wall last night. Yeah, I'm not kidding. He found him with a camera he normally uses on lungs. So we want to bring in Dr. Benjamin. He's a lung specialist at Northwestern, so he knew exactly what he was doing. Good afternoon, Doc. Good afternoon. Start at the beginning for me here. How does How does a kitten end up inside a wall? Well, it's a good question. We were putting, everybody was getting ready for bed and, you know, we were putting our kitten into his room for the night and it came to our attention that the kids couldn't find him, couldn't find Nico. So we engaged in a house-wide search for Nico and were able to figure out that he had somehow gotten inside the walls. We assume through... Through an unfinished part of the basement, ended up getting into the ceiling and then dropping down and getting trapped in the wall. No, it looks like a tight space there too. So you could hear him then, I guess, meowing. Exactly. We heard him meowing through the wall and then realized that the only way to get him out was to go through the wall. So before I went ahead and committed to demoing the wall, I drilled a hole in it and used a borescope, which is very much like the endoscopes that I use, bronchoscopes that I use at work, to confirm that he was there and safely away from the part that I was going to knock down. We were able to locate him and rescue him. So you just have a borescope just sitting around the house? Well, it's probably a professional hazard of mine. You know, I find long, flexible cameras to be incredibly useful in my work, and they're pretty useful at home, as is demonstrated by this episode. Yeah, talk a little more about how you use that tool at work on actual lungs. So, the nature of my work is that I do a lot of diagnostic and therapeutic interventions using these bronchoscopes for diseases of the chest, mainly lung cancer, diagnosing, staging, treating. And it allows us to get information and help patients while being minimally invasive. What did your kids do when he popped out? They were over the moon, to put it mildly, and I was able to enjoy being a hero for one night to them. I like that, I like that. So how is Nico doing, he's okay? He seems to be doing okay, recovering. Actually, he seems to be over it more quickly than the rest of us. I can imagine. Yeah, I can just imagine the panic of not being able to find him, then hearing him in the wall, then trying to figure out what you guys needed to do to get him out of said wall. I'm glad this had a happy ending here, though. I gotta ask you this, it is the season, Halloween, what are your kids dressing up as? Any of them, since you are the family hero now, they plan on dressing up as you, maybe? Yeah, I wish. No, so my son Leo is dressing up as a sumo wrestler, my daughter is dressing up as a cat in honor of Nico, and Nico is dressed up as a French artist, I think you showed a picture of. him in his French artist costume, which we certainly found more amusing than he does. I bet. That's always a strategy, just trying to get a pet in a costume. Doc, thanks so much for joining us on The Loop, and I'm glad Nico's okay, glad the family is okay as well. I hope you guys have a happy and healthy Halloween. And to you. Thank you.