14/10/2023
Oscar the Cat was born in 2005 and was one of six cats adopted by the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island in the United States. He earned his fame through a publication in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007. Oscar was noted to make his own ward rounds in the nursing home, sniffing and observing patients. Indifferent to most, he would then decide to curl up on the bed of only certain patients. The patients he identified would invariably die within a few hours. The cat was so precise in his assessment of impending death, that the staff developed a protocol that required that patient’s family to be called in, in anticipation of death. We read – ‘His mere presence at the bedside is viewed by physicians and nursing home staff as an almost absolute indicator of impending death’.The author of the article, geriatrician Dr David Dosa, later published a touching book about dementia – Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat. While the reliability on the cat may seem strange in modern health care settings, the family of a patient that died with Oscar at the bedside reported: ‘it’s not that we trusted the cat more than the nurse. Not, exactly. It was … well, there was just something about Oscar. He seemed so convinced of what he was doing. He was so clear in his intention and his dedication’. This underscored the importance of the prediction of death and the acknowledgement of the dying process. As of January 2010, Oscar the Cat accurately predicted 50 deaths.
Reported from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5624465/ #:~:text=The%20case%20of%20Oscar&text=Oscar%20was%20noted%20to%20make,die%20within%20a%20few%20hours.
