Everyone at the clinic immediately stopped to help.
One Tuesday in September, Lea Perugini realized that she hadn’t seen her 7-year-old orange tabby, Eli, all day. While Eli is a pretty outgoing cat and sometimes likes to pop out for a breath of fresh air around his Boston neighborhood, “he doesn’t go and wander,” Perugini told The Dodo.
Perugini was getting a little worried, so she decided to go out and check Eli’s usual haunts. Next door, Perugini noticed that a huge foam insulation truck had been there most of the day, but she didn’t think much of it.
An hour into her search, she got a call from her roommate, who had just arrived home and noticed an animal rescue worker next door with a cat. “[My roommate] was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s Eli, he got sprayed,’” Perugini said. “And I started, like, sprinting home. I ran a record-time mile back to my house.”
Workers had been spraying foam insulation in the attic next door, and for some unknown reason, Eli decided to investigate. Perugini said he’s not scared of anything, so he probably saw the whole escapade as a fun adventure — until it suddenly wasn’t. Now, Eli’s entire body and face were covered in an ivory foam that had hardened and wouldn’t come off.
Perugini phoned VEG in Newton to let them know that she was on her way with Eli. In the busy emergency room, Dr. Thamires Nunes was a little puzzled when she heard about the situation over the phone. She was more than happy to help poor Eli but wondered if he even needed her. “I was like, ‘We’re not groomers, but we can [help],’” Dr. Nunes told The Dodo. “We were just doing the other cases in the ER, and then all of a sudden, Eli comes in, and we’re like, ‘Oh my God. This is a bit more than a little bit of spray foam.’”
The team immediately triaged Eli and made sure he was still breathing OK. “He had the tiniest little bubble around his nose where he could still breathe properly, even though his full eyes and mouth were basically shut,” Dr. Nunes said. She suspects that he managed to blow some of the foam away, or perhaps he was able to swat some away before it hardened. “He got very, very lucky,” she added.
The team administered some pain medication and sedated him so that they could begin the difficult task of freeing his body from the foam.
“We felt the time crunch,” Dr. Nunes said. “We just started hacking along. And it was a team of five or six nurses. Everybody got some tool that they could find in the hospital to be able to do this. Most of it was like breaking pieces of foam. Others were shaving.”
Dr. Nunes, worried that Eli might have ingested some foam, called the ASPCA poison hotline to confirm that the foam wasn’t toxic (it wasn’t), but even as that worry dissipated, another arose.
“We had concerns about his vision, like, did spray foam get into his eye?” Dr. Nunes explained. Another good fortune: Because Eli was such a fluffy cat, the foam had adhered to his fur, not his skin or eyes. And so, after two hours of “straight shaving and cracking and breaking stuff up,” he was free and completely naked.
Back home, Eli seemed unfazed by the whole scenario. “The second I brought him home, he acted like nothing happened to him [even though] he was shaved,” Perugini said. “He looked like a sphynx cat. It was so funny.”
It took two months for his hair to grow back, and now he looks just like his old self.
He’s even back to his role of being a little bit famous in his Boston neighborhood, where he often hangs out on the front steps with his mom. “He’s like the neighborhood celebrity cat,” Perugini said.
As for Dr. Nunes and the staff at VEG in Newton, they won’t forget the foam-covered Eli they met back in September. “I mean … No one has ever seen anything even remotely like what happened to Eli,” Dr. Nunes said.