When doctors and staff realised that a cat living in a US nursing home could sense when someone was going to die, the feline, Oscar, was portrayed as a furry grim reaper or four-legged angel of death.
But Dr David Dosa, who broke the news of Oscar’s abilities in a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007, said he never intended to make Oscar sound creepy or his arrival at a bedside to be viewed negatively.
Extra-ordinary gift
Dosa hopes his new book: Making Rounds With Oscar, The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat, will put the cat in a more favourable light and provide a book to help people whose loved ones are terminally ill.
"After the New England Journal article you got the feeling that if Oscar is in your bed then you are dead, but you did not really see what is going on for these family members," said Dosa, an assistant professor of medicine at Brown University.
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"I wanted to write a book that would go beyond Oscar’s peculiarities, to tell why he is important to family members and caregivers who have been with him at the end of a life."
Oscar was adopted as a kitten from an animal shelter to be raised as a therapy cat at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Centre in Providence, Rhode Island, which cares for people with severe dementia and in the final stages of various illnesses.
When Oscar was about six months old the staff noticed that he would curl up to sleep with patients who were about to die. He has accurately predicted about 50 deaths. Dosa recounts one instance when staff was convinced of the imminent death of one patient but Oscar refused to sit with that person, choosing instead the bed of another patient down the hallway. He died proving Oscar right.
—Reuters
