For most of the past week, one of the most-watched videos on the internet was a pair of hands reaching into a hole in a bathroom wall in Franklin Square. The hands belong to John DeBacker, a 33-year-old from Bellmore who has spent more than 15 years pulling Long Island's cats out of the places cats should not be. The cat in the wall was named Lola, and by the time DeBacker got her out she had been trapped for about five days, most of it likely upside down.

Five days inside a wall

Lola disappeared while her family was moving out of a second-floor apartment in Franklin Square. Somewhere in the chaos of boxes and open doors she slipped beneath the floorboards, and from there she dropped into a cavity inside a wall, a space too tight to turn around in and too deep to climb out of. She spent days wedged there, nibbling insulation, growing weaker, while the search for her went on around the building.

On the evening of September 18, DeBacker announced to his followers that Lola had been located. What happened next is the part the world has now seen: a hole opened in the wall, a long reach into a gap barely wide enough for a forearm, and a dusty, exhausted black cat easing out into the light. She was scared, she was hungry, and she was alive.

Then the whole planet showed up

The clip did what clips like that do. Within days it was everywhere the national networks post video, spread across the big animal accounts, and traveled from New York to California and overseas, a run DeBacker himself has been marveling at on his own page, where more than half a million people follow his rescues. National outlets came calling for interviews, and the wire services carried the story to papers that have never once printed the words Franklin Square. For a man whose usual audience is Long Islanders wondering how a cat ended up inside a wall, a storm drain or a school bus, it has been a strange and happy couple of weeks.

DeBacker is not new to this. He is the vice president of Long Island Cat/Kitten Solution, a local rescue organization, and his back catalog includes freeing a possum from a Wantagh trash can and more stray and stuck cats than anyone has bothered to count. Just this past week, between everything else, he posted about a cat found riding a Farmingdale school bus that needed a foster home.

The shredder in Oyster Bay

The week was not done with him. Last Thursday, workers at a maintenance yard in the Oyster Bay area heard crying coming from inside an industrial shredder. They stopped, unscrewed the machine piece by piece, and found three newborn black kittens huddled inside equipment that would have destroyed them the moment someone flipped it on. One of the workers covered the kittens with a towel and called DeBacker, who drove over and pulled the trio to safety.

The kittens are now with a bottle feeder, doing well, and will be put up for adoption once they are old enough. The story ran in the New York Post on Monday, which means that for the second time in a week, a Long Island cat rescue was national news.

What it means if you have a cat

There is a practical lesson buried in Lola's five days, and DeBacker's whole career is a testament to it: moving day is the most dangerous day of a cat's year. A stressed cat does not run out the front door so much as fold itself into the building, under floorboards, behind cabinets, inside walls. Keeping a cat crated or shut in an empty room until the last box is gone is the boring advice that prevents the dramatic video.

And if it is too late for the boring advice, take comfort in the other lesson of the week: somewhere between Bellmore and wherever your wall is, there is a man who has spent 15 years getting very, very good at this.