Nursing home cat Oscar takes on Grim Reaper role
4:00 AM Tuesday Feb 2, 2010
Oscar at Steere House where he comforts dying patients. Photo / AP
Dr David Dosa was sceptical when he was told that Oscar, an aloof cat kept at a nursing home, regularly predicted patients' deaths by snuggling alongside them in their final hours.
Dr Dosa's doubts eroded after he and colleagues tallied about 50 correct calls by Oscar over five years, a process he explains in a book released this week, Making Rounds With Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat.
The feline's bizarre talent astounds Dr Dosa, but he finds Oscar's real worth in his insistence on being present when others turn away from the taboo subject of death.
"People actually were taking great comfort in this idea, that this animal was there and might be there when their loved ones eventually pass," Dr Dosa said. "He was there when they couldn't be."
Dr Dosa, 37, a geriatrician and professor at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, works with patients with severe dementia.
It's usually the last stop for people so ill they cannot speak, recognise their spouses and spend their days lost in fragments of memory.
He once feared that families would be horrified by the furry Grim Reaper, especially after Dr Dosa made Oscar famous in a 2007 essay in the New England Journal of Medicine. Instead, he says many caregivers consider Oscar a comforting presence, and some have praised him in death notices and eulogies.
"Maybe they're seeing what they want to see but what they're seeing is a comfort to them in a real difficult time in their lives."
The nursing home adopted Oscar in 2005 because its staff thinks pets make Steere House a home. They play with visiting children and prove a welcome distraction for patients and doctors.
After a year, the staff noticed that Oscar would spend his days pacing from room to room. He sniffed and looked at the patients but rarely spent much time with anyone - except when they had just hours to live.
He's accurate enough that staff - including Dr Dosa - know it's time to call relatives when Oscar stretches beside their patients. If kept outside the room of a dying patient, he'll scratch at doors and walls, trying to get in.
Nurses once placed Oscar in the bed of a patient they thought gravely ill. Oscar wouldn't stay put, and the staff thought his gift was lost. The patient rallied for two days but, in the final hours, Oscar held his bedside vigil without prompting.
Dr Dosa does not explain Oscar scientifically in his book, although he theorises that the cat imitates the nurses who raised him or smells odours given off by dying cells, perhaps like some dogs who scientists say can detect cancer using their sense of scent.
At its heart, Dr Dosa's search is more about how people cope with death. Dr Dosa has inflammatory arthritis and worries about losing control of his life in old age, much as his patients have lost theirs.
Parts of his book are fictionalised. Dr Dosa said several patients are composite characters, though the names and stories of the caregivers he interviews are real.
Many of them feel guilty about putting relatives in a care home. Donna Richards told Dr Dosa she felt troubled for not visiting her mother enough.
Ms Richards was at her mother's bedside nonstop as she lay dying. After three days, a nurse persuaded her to go home for a rest. Her mother died a short while later.
But she didn't die alone, Oscar was there.
- AP
