I thought their strange nighttime vigils were just another inexplicable cat habit. Only when I watched the footage in slow motion did the truth hit me: at the exact moment they turned frantic, my body went still. No rise of my chest, no breath, just a slack, unfamiliar face on the screen where mine should have been. My cats weren’t staring at me; they were monitoring me.
A doctor later put a name to what the camera had captured: sleep apnea, long pauses where my brain simply forgot to keep me alive. While I slept in ignorance, they leapt, pawed, and stamped across my ribs, forcing some reflex deep inside me to restart. Treatment changed everything. The machine hums softly now, and they sleep elsewhere. Yet sometimes they sit in the doorway, watching, as if remembering the nights they quietly dragged me back from the edge.
