When Neko vanished behind the basement drywall, a Northwestern Medicine pulmonologist reached for a drill and a tiny camera. Medicine has been fishing things out of tight spaces this way for 129 years.
Written: Emma Nguyễn
Every specialist quietly believes their particular skill would come in handy during a household emergency. Most never get to prove it. Last week, a lung doctor in Chicago’s western suburbs did.
Dr. Benjamin Seides is an interventional pulmonologist at the Canning Thoracic Institute at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital. His working day involves steering a slender camera down people’s airways to look at places nobody can otherwise see. According to reports from NBC Chicago and CBS Chicago, both published October 30, he was home after a day of treating patients, getting ready for bed, when the family realized their kitten was missing. [1][2]
The kitten is Neko, described by NBC as a Russian blue and by CBS as five months old. The family searched the house, calling his name, until they heard a faint meow from the basement. Neko had climbed into the ceiling through an unfinished part of the house and ended up behind a wall in the finished part of the basement. He could be heard. He could not be seen, and nobody could tell exactly where he was. [1][2]
For a bronchoscopist this is, if you squint, an ordinary day at the office: something is in a dark, narrow space where it does not belong, and the job is to find it without making matters worse.
So Seides drilled a small hole in the drywall and fed in a borescope, a long, flexible camera built for inspecting cramped, hard-to-reach spaces. It is a close cousin of the instrument he uses on patients; the same kind of device made for the human body is called an endoscope. [3] He steered it through the dark much as he would during a procedure. CBS reports it took a few more holes to pin down the spot. He then opened a gap big enough for Neko to crawl through, and the kitten was back with his family. [1][2] Neither report mentions any injury. The drywall, one assumes, will need a follow-up appointment.
Northwestern Medicine, which knows a good story when a staff member hands it one, said in a statement that this patient walked on four legs, wore a gray coat and had, in the hospital’s words, “a talent for finding trouble.” [2]
A very old trick
What lifts this above a cute pet story, though it is certainly also a cute pet story, is how neatly it echoes the way Seides’ field started.
Bronchoscopy began as a retrieval job. The German physician Gustav Killian is credited with the first one, in 1897, when he used a rigid scope to remove a pork bone from a patient who was awake, with topical cocaine as the anesthetic. [4] The American physician Chevalier Jackson turned retrieval into a life’s work. His collection of more than 2,300 objects that patients inhaled or swallowed, all removed without surgery, is on permanent display at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. [5]
The flexible bronchoscope, the version that bends around corners, is credited to the Japanese physician Shigeto Ikeda in 1966. [4] That makes it 60 years old this year, and a basement in DuPage County is as good a place as any to mark the occasion.
Opinion: the best kind of work story
Here is my read, and it is only that. Hospitals spend a great deal of effort trying to explain what their subspecialists do. “Interventional pulmonologist” means little to most people until their own lungs are the topic. A 39-second local news clip about a kitten in a wall explains it better than any brochure: find the hidden thing, make the smallest hole you can, get in, get out.
That is the logic of minimally invasive medicine in general, including the interventional radiology this site covers so often. The tools differ. The instinct is the same: don’t tear down the wall if a small hole and a good camera will do.
One note of restraint. A borescope is an inspection tool, not a medical device, and nothing here is an invitation to attempt home procedures on anything with a pulse. What Seides brought home from the hospital wasn’t equipment. It was the habit of looking before cutting.
Neko has issued no statement and, being a kitten, has presumably learned nothing.
References
NBC Chicago, “Chicago doctor saves kitten trapped inside wall using surgical tools,” October 30, 2026. https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-doctor-saves-kitten-trapped-in-wall-using-surgical-tools/4009852/
CBS Chicago, “Northwestern Medicine lung doctor uses medical skills to rescue kitten from inside wall,” October 30, 2026. https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/northwestern-medicine-lung-doctor-rescue-kitten-wall/
Wikipedia, “Borescope.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borescope
Wikipedia, “Bronchoscopy” (history section: Killian 1897, Ikeda 1966). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronchoscopy
Wikipedia, “Chevalier Jackson” (foreign-body collection at the Mütter Museum). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevalier_Jackson
