Posted on 02/02/2010 7:45:26 AM PST by C19fan
A cat with an uncanny ability to detect when nursing home patients are about to die has proven itself in around 50 cases by curling up with them in their final hours, according to a new book.
Dr David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University, said that five years of records showed Oscar rarely erring, sometimes proving medical staff at the New England nursing home wrong in their predictions over which patients were close to death.
The cat, now five and generally unsociable, was adopted as a kitten at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre in Providence, Rhode Island, which specialises in caring for people with severe dementia.
Dr Dosa first publicised Oscar's gift in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007. Since then, the cat has gone on to double the number of imminent deaths it has sensed and convinced the geriatrician that it is no fluke.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
So long as I can avoid it, no member of my family will spend their last years in a nursing home. I realize sometimes it's unavoidable, but I am no fan of that arrangement.
Wouldn’t surprise me as a cats sense of smell is better than a human’s and they can smell death, part of the scavenging instinct....
Steak?? Don't forget the A-1!
They should bring the cat to Murtha’s ICU and report on its activities.
Close friends get to call him “TC”.
I seem to recall an instance in which such a death predicting cat was killed by a nursing home resident.
That was a satire article, Oscar is alive and well.
>> Burn it at the steak!!!
Steak?? Don’t forget the A-1! <<
Mmmm, Kitty steaks!!! Yummy yum yum!
Totally tasteless. LMAO.
LOL! Much better!
There are dogs that can be trained to pick up human scents that spell danger, so I’m not surprised. Sorry I don’t have more information on this. It was told to me by a girl in a wheelchair who had a metabolic disorder. Her little doggie, always with her wherever she went, had been trained to detect when she was in danger. Another case of mother having been told to abort, by the way.
Despite what one or two of the posts have said here, CATS ARE NOT EVIL! What I see here is that this cat, Oscar KNEW they folks needed a dear one, even if it is a pet, or in this case, him, to be by their side when they were passing. Sadly, not everyone has a human dear one, even one person, by their side when they are passing. At least with Oscar, they do not DIE ALONE.
Thanks for this posting SandA’s!:)=^..^=
Bravo.
He can sense the terminal ZOT.
I used to have a yellow tabby named Oscar, 1981-1994. Died of feline AIDS. He was very unsociable to strangers. Very friendly to me, 2nd best cat I ever had. Oslo, 1994-2009 was the friendliest and was the best.
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