The Mind of a Cat Doctor

If it was on October 24th, then my cell phone went straight to voicemail.

Here's why: I bent over to flush the toilet next door in the surgery building, and to my horror, my cell phone leaped out of my pocket and was sucked into the depths of raw sewage hell. That's right. I flushed my cell phone down the toilet. Panic set in, and I convinced myself that I needed to rip apart the toilet immediately to find my cell phone.

What was I going to do without my cell phone? How was I going to contact my friends and family? I didn't know anyone's numbers! Could I live without text messaging? What about all the cute pictures of my dog I had stored on my phone? What if Oprah was calling to ask me to be a guest on her show?

I plunged the toilet until I broke a sweat. No luck. I put on an exam glove and reached down the toilet to see if it was stuck there. No luck. I ran out into the surgical suite and announced to everyone that I flushed my cell phone down the toilet. They laughed, of course, but they didn't understand how lost I was without my phone! I asked if it was possible to take the toilet apart to search for it, or if I could go underneath the building and find it in the pipes. They laughed again and offered little hope for retrieving my most prized possession. Dr. Filip announced that he was having a crummy day until I flushed my phone. Glad I could help.

Where was it? I imagined it sitting in a rusty pipe, crying out to me to save it as it drowned in human waste. Was it o.k.? Was it hurt? Would it work again if I found it? Would I find it one day in the gutter after a hard rain? Would it still work then? What was I going to do? Should I call a search team?


I figured the first thing to do was to suspend my cell phone account in case the rats in the sewer went on a calling spree. Done. I then filed insurance on my phone and had the company ship me a replacement for $50. They laughed too when I told them what happened. Some customer support!

Once I knew there was nothing I could do to retrieve my phone, I relaxed a bit. I needed the energy to figure out how to live without a cell phone for 24 hours. I went home after work that day and wallowed in my misery while I watched weeknight television.

My new phone arrived via Express Mail the next day. We threw a party and I banned myself from cell phone usage in the bathroom. I decided that when I'm due for an upgrade on my phone I won't choose the smallest phone on the market "because it just looks so cute!" I may revert back to the shoebox-sized phones from the 80's.