The Shape of Gone Things

There are things that are the most visible when they’re no longer there. Gone Lately, our oldest pet, MiniBeastie (of her real name IV as in Ivy and cat number 4) has not been well. She started coughing and not breathing well in the winter. At first we attributed it to some passing illness or hairballs. And it was coming and going, so it seemed a sensible diagnosis. Things were mostly fine. But by early May she started doing it more. So we decided to take her to the vet. There, he wasn’t sure what was happening: she didn’t have any fever so it wasn’t an infection, but he could hear noises in her breathing. So he decided we needed to do an x-ray to see what was happening. On the x-ray, we discovered a past history that we had never known about: when she was a kitten, she had been hit by something, possibly a car. She had ribs forming sharp angles, not parallel to each other. Her thorax was generally messed up but healed. We adopted her when she was a few months old. I had discovered…