Yesterday morning in Oakland.

The text from our cat sitter came in at 7:19 a.m. Pacific Time, while we were downstairs eating breakfast. I didn’t notice it until we got back to our room, maybe 15-20 minutes later.

The message was short and poignant. She reported that her husband’s health had taken a turn for the worse.

“I can’t leave him, I’m afraid that he’s not going to pull through,” she wrote. And then: “I don’t know what to do about Duke.”

Duke is our diabetic cat, who needs to get an insulin shot morning and evening.

I was saddened to hear about her husband. And I felt guilty for being more frantic over the problem of arranging alternate in-home care for the cats on short notice. Her message brought the realization that we were far less than fully prepared for a cat crisis of this kind than we needed to be.

It was not yet 5 a.m. in Honolulu at this point, so I had some time to plot out the next moves.

First step. Find out if our friends just up the street were traveling or home. If the latter, ask if one of them could walk over and give Duke his shot. They had helped us out one other morning several months ago, so they knew the drill. If they were home. So I sent off a text message and copied it to an email. Nothing more to do there but wait on their reply.

Then I turned to the problem of who could take over cat care until our return to Honolulu on Sunday.

Luckily, we recently interviewed a woman as a potential back-up cat sitter, and had already scheduled her to do the cat care during our next short trip off island. She is experienced, asked the right questions, and immediately got along with the cats, so she was our obvious Plan B. But I didn’t know whether she was available right now, and had not gone into any of the nitty-gritty of getting through our security system, selecting the right food for each cat, or details of Duke’s insulin shots. And it was only about 5:40 a.m. in Honolulu, too early to call. So, again, I sent off a text message and sat down to wait, and to fret over potential Plan C and beyond if these first possibilities didn’t pan out. Anxiety!

I waited until it was 7 a.m. in Honolulu before calling our friend who lives just a few houses up the street. Luckily, she and her husband were not traveling, and she was able to walk over and give Duke his morning shot.

And within an hour, I got a message back from our Plan B cat sitter saying she could jump right in and take over. Whew! What a relief! As soon as she was free, we connected by phone and I walked her through as many details as I could think of. She asked whether the cats had favorite toys, whether they like to be brushed, what food(s) to put out, etc. And then we went about our day as normally as possible, including a wonderful lunch at a Berkeley tapas bar with good friends who live in the area, while we waited to see how her first full visit would go at the end of the day.

We were lucky. And she was very good. We were having dinner with an old friend, a former Hawaii resident, when I got a buzz on my watch notifying me the garage door had been opened, and the security system disarmed. So far, so good. A few minutes later, she texted a couple of questions about the foods to put out, etc. Luckily, Duke and Romeo are far more social then they were as younger cats, so she had no trouble finding Duke and giving him his shot. And although she didn’t lay eyes on Ms. Annie, I assured her that’s par for the course. Annie is fine with us, but tends to disappear when anyone else comes into the house. I explained where to put a special dish of her food, a spot on the top of “her” cat tree that is beyond the reach of Romeo and Duke.

So by the end of the day, I could let all involved know that the cats are in good hands, the crisis had been resolved.

And that did make it a happy birthday after all.