Nurses of the Week: ED Nurses Brave Sewer in Daring Kitten Emergency Rescue

Our Nurse of the Week column celebrates the New Jersey nurses who saved Trenton last month. (In the interest of full disclosure, the rescuee’s name is “Trent,” but he was named for Trenton, New Jersey, so these nurses absolutely “saved Trenton”).

The nursing profession has always attracted people who have an innate urge to help, and hardly a week passes without news about some nurse who stopped on a dime to aid people (or kittens) in almost every imaginable setting. So, when an off-duty nurse buying veggies sees someone collapse at their neighborhood grocery store or witnesses a devastating auto accident en route to work, we assume they will take charge, ensure that help is forthcoming, and attend to the most pressing needs of any injured or endangered party.

It is easy to take this for granted—to say, “oh, nurses are always doing that!” However, the fact that such events are so common attests to the extraordinariness of a profession where on the clock or off, going out of one’s way to save and help others is the norm—and while in most cases those “others” are human, nurses will on occasion branch out and save members of more advanced species such as felis catus.

The ED nurses at Capital Health Regional Medical Center in Trenton New Jersey have no plans to enter the veterinary field, but their versatile skill set was put to good use on the last Sunday night in May. That evening, as incoming and outgoing staff converged during a shift change, casual exchanges of shop talk and gossip trailed off when a series of distressed feline mews and squeaks emerged from a sewer at the back of the nearby ambulance bay.

It was a Kitten Emergency! A small boy cat was in trouble mere yards from the ED, but could not escape the sewer to reach the waiting room. Apparently, the imperiled kitten had sufficient lives in his account or plenty of good karma to his credit — because his “Kitten Emergency!” call managed to penetrate a roomful of trauma nurses, EMTs, and other ED personnel.

Placing their own spin on the firefighter tradition of rescuing cats stranded in trees, 15 Capital staffers formed an ad hoc Kitten Emergency! Rescue Unit (KE!RU) to extract the poor boy from his noisome confinement.

Having prepared by scavenging rescue equipment such as blankets, cat food, and turkey leftovers from the previous shift, the KE!RU team worked for nearly 2 hours to open the sewer grate and coax the frightened, stinky little boy to emerge. When they had calmed the kitten enough to venture further, ED trauma nurse, educator, and experienced hospital squirrel rescuer Heather Hendrickson, BSN/RN swaddled him in a towel and placed him in the hands of her colleague, nurse practitioner Celeste Shamma, NP, BSN/RN.

As they comforted the shaken boy kitten and assisted him with his toilette, the KE!RU team named him “Trent” (in honor of Trenton, NJ, the city in which he experienced his dramatic rescue).

Trent has now settled in a pleasant, safe, loving, and not at all smelly home. His sewer adventure and rescue by the KE!RU was fortuitous not only for Trent but also for a staff RN who had been looking to adopt an animal. In a local interview, Hendrickson said that her fellow RN had recently “been scammed by a breeder when trying to get a kitten for her family, so it seemed like this was meant to be.”