Written in 2014, a few months after the original decision.
I posted a while ago about living my principles, and the kitten I’d adopted who turned out to need major surgery.
Fifi is now six months old.
He had the surgery in June to correct the vascular ring defect. First a CT scan, which found he does indeed have a heart defect — the underlying cause of the ring. Fortunately nothing critical sat near where they needed to operate. It was major thoracic surgery, and afterwards we had to keep him quarantined away from his siblings for nearly two weeks.
Feeding did not go smoothly at first, and for a while we weren’t sure whether he’d need a feeding tube permanently. He caught on eventually. While he was boarded at the vet school in July, during a trip I took with the Girl Scouts, he started eating by mouth.
By the time I got home he was taking everything orally, though on a liquid diet — pureed cat food and an assortment of other things blended until smooth. Slowly he moved to regular moist food, largely because he preferred what the other cats were eating to his own. That became a battle of wills. We had to restrict his solid food and he was determined to have it. There were feeding strikes and outright tantrums. It was remarkably like negotiating with a toddler.
Eventually he was on an all-moist diet. After about a week we tried dry kibble, and he managed it and kept it down. Right around then he pulled his feeding tube out somehow. We found it, took him straight to the vet school at NC State, and they decided that since he’d been eating and holding it down for a while, they’d leave it out.
So by mid-August we had a kitten with no feeding tube.
He continues to grow and loves getting into mischief. He and his brothers were neutered and microchipped in September. I joke that I have the most expensive “free” kitten in history.
The part the first post couldn’t cover
The earlier piece was about making the decision. This one is about what the decision actually cost, and that turns out to be the more useful half.
Deciding took an afternoon at the vet school, a hard conversation, and a number I agreed to. That was the dramatic part, and it’s the part that makes a good story about principles.
What followed was four months of blended cat food, tube feeding around the clock, quarantine, a boarding arrangement because I had a Girl Scout trip I’d already committed to, a series of arguments with a small animal about texture, and an ongoing series of bills.
None of that was heroic. It was just relentless, and nobody was watching.
Which is the thing about follow-through
Decisions get all the attention. They’re discrete, they feel significant, and you can describe one at a dinner party.
Follow-through is neither dramatic nor visible, and it’s where almost everything is actually won or lost.
I see this constantly in businesses:
- The strategy day that produces genuine clarity and three priorities, and then nothing changes because the priorities required somebody to do dull work every week for a year.
- The hire made after weeks of careful interviewing, then left to sink or swim because onboarding them properly was tedious.
- The new process everyone agreed to, abandoned by week six, because agreeing was interesting and complying is not.
- The value stated confidently and then quietly not applied the first time it was expensive.
In every case the decision was correct. The decision was also the cheap part.
So the useful question when you’re deciding something isn’t only “is this right?” It’s “am I prepared to do the boring version of this for as long as it takes?” Because that’s what you’re actually agreeing to, and it’s what nobody quite tells you at the moment of commitment.
On the most expensive free thing
The joke about the free kitten holds more generally than it should.
Most of the expensive things in a business arrived described as cheap or free. The client who came in at a discount and then consumed three times the support. The tool that was free for the first tier and now underpins something you can’t easily move. The favour done for a friend that became an unpaid obligation lasting years.
None of those were mistakes at the point of acquisition. They just had costs that revealed themselves over time rather than at the moment of decision — which is precisely why they weren’t weighed properly.
Worth asking, when something looks cheap: what does this cost in month eight?
A note added later: Fifi lived eleven years. Obnoxious, loving, ornery and adored. The four months of blended cat food remain, comfortably, the best money I have ever spent.
