How Much Would You Pay to Save Your Cat’s Life?
Photographs by Caroline Tompkins for The Atlantic
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When I first met Strawberry, age 16, she was lying on her back, paws akimbo. Her cat belly was shaved bare, and black stitches ran several inches down her naked pink skin.
A radiologist squirted ultrasound goop on her abdomen while two veterinary students in dark-blue scrubs gently held down her legs—not that this was really necessary. Strawberry was too tired, too drugged, or simply too out of it from her surgery the previous day to protest. In the dim light of the radiology room, her pupils were dilated into deep black pools. She slowly turned her head toward me. She turned away. She looked around at the small crowd of doctors and students surrounding her, as if to wonder what on God’s green earth had happened for her to end up like this.
What had happened was that Strawberry had received a kidney transplant. A surgical team at the University of Georgia had shaved off patches of her long ginger fur, inserting catheters in her leg and neck to deliver the cocktail of drugs she would need during her hospital stay: anesthesia, painkillers, antibiotics, blood thinners, and immunosuppressants. Then a surgeon named Chad Schmiedt carefully cut down the midline of her belly—past the two shriveled kidneys that were no longer doing their job and almost to her groin. Next, he stitched into place a healthy new kidney, freshly retrieved from a living donor just hours earlier.
Schmiedt is one of only a few surgeons who perform transplants on cats, and is therefore one of the world’s foremost experts at connecting cat kidneys. When he first greeted me with a broad smile and a handshake, I was struck by how his large, callused hand engulfed mine. In the operating room, though, his hands work with microscopic precision, stitching up arteries and veins only millimeters wide. This is the hardest part, he told me, like sewing “wet rice paper.” Once the donor kidney was in place, it flushed pink and Schmiedt closed Strawberry back up. (As in human transplants, the old kidneys can stay in place.) It was then a matter of waiting for her to wake up and pee. She had done both by the time of her ultrasound.
Not that Strawberry could understand any of this—or that any cat understands why we humans insist on bringing them to vet offices to be poked and prodded by strangers. But without the transplant, she would die of kidney failure, an affliction akin to being gradually poisoned from within. Other treatments could slow her kidney disease, which is common in older cats, but they could not stop it. This is why Strawberry’s owner decided to spend $15,000 on a kidney—a last resort to save her life, or at least extend it.
I didn’t meet her owner in the hospital that day. Strawberry would need to be hospitalized for at least a week after the surgery, and cat owners—who come from all over the country and even the world for kidney transplants; Schmiedt’s farthest patient traveled to Athens, Georgia, from Moscow—cannot always stay the entire time, because of work or family responsibilities. Strawberry’s owner had dropped her off right before the surgery and would pick her up after she recovered.
But also, the owner didn’t want her name in a magazine article about $15,000 kidney transplants. (That’s the cost of the surgery at UGA; with travel and follow-up care, the total can be two or three times that amount.) She wasn’t alone in not wanting to be named. In the course of reporting this story, I spoke with
