Oscar, the angel of death
“American doctors are baffled by a cat that can apparently predict when nursing home patients are about to die.
“Oscar, who lives at a nursing home, curls up next to sick patients in their final hours. So far he has been right in 25 cases, leading staff at the home to alert relatives when he is seen settling on a patient’s bed. It usually means they have less than four hours to live. “He doesn’t make too many mistakes. He seems to understand when patients are about to die,” said Dr David Dosa, who describes Oscar’s uncanny knack for predicting death in the New England Journal of Medicine.”
Nice-looking cat, too, for a harbinger of death. My felines are more like identifiers of loathsomeness. When they show a marked aversion to a human, that human always turns out to be a creep.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
July 27th, 2007 at 14:00
Whoa. Amazing.
July 27th, 2007 at 14:46
I’m sorry if this comment is misplaced, but there’s no comment space available in your profile page. Anyway. I watched the ‘Points of View’ episode wherein Joel Torre guested, and having read one of your essays in one of your Twisted books, (I am sorry for the lack of details) I am wondering why you weren’t present in the second half of the talk show. I forever assumed that you couldn’t help but melt at the sight of Torre. Was I correct?
July 27th, 2007 at 17:10
I heard about this story too!i think animals are too sensitive about human feelings, they can feel the slightest muscle twitch or hear the softest sound.
i wonder if this cat is up for auction.
July 28th, 2007 at 13:06
Probably the last oldies to kick trhe bucket believed in Oscar to much that when the cat lurked near them, they worried themselves to death!
July 28th, 2007 at 18:11
I have always believed in cats as Hades’s official harbinger of death. They are so wired to feel the slightest bit of discordance or disruption in the fabric of life — thus they would know if a sick person is marked for the voyage down to the great beyond. I think that they detect it through the person’s breath — smell of cells slowly degenerating. I don’t know really but, cats even display signs of bereavement whenever a companion is absent or something. Reason why I still send periiodic support to our family cat in the province.
July 31st, 2007 at 02:13
animals have senses keener than our own. there are reports of dogs and cats being able to predict the onset of an epileptic seizure so a feline being able to sense death is certainly within the realm of possibility :)
August 1st, 2007 at 01:00
Speaking of cats, I know yours are indoor ones, except for Matt briefly in his life, but there’s a guy who attached a camera to his cat’s collar so that he has an idea of what his cat does when he’s not around: http://mr-lee-catcam.de/
August 1st, 2007 at 17:42
extraordinary though but not unheard..my aunt who is a nurse in Gat Andres Bonifacio Gen. Hospital in Tondo Manila told us about this stray black cat that camps under a bed of some patient and the patient will die after a couple of hours. So everytime the nurses saw the cat they shooed it away.