Maybe this isn’t as uplifting as they think
Indulge me for a moment here, folks. Because while this does take place in a Nursing Home, it does not have to do with the popularity of the Wii in nursing homes. In fact, it has nothing to do with videogames at all, but I have a blog, and so I will comment on this.
Oscar the cat predicts patients’ deaths
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.
Wow, it’s like God’s angel cat! He knows when people are going to die and curls up next to them to comfort them in their waning hours! Forward this email to 10 other people so that they can know the true miracle of God’s angel cat for themselves!
Except…
Dosa said Oscar seems to take his work seriously and is generally aloof. “This is not a cat that’s friendly to people,” he said.
Oscar is better at predicting death than the people who work there, said Dr. Joan Teno of Brown University, who treats patients at the nursing home and is an expert on care for the terminally ill
She was convinced of Oscar’s talent when he made his 13th correct call. While observing one patient, Teno said she noticed the woman wasn’t eating, was breathing with difficulty and that her legs had a bluish tinge, signs that often mean death is near.
OK, now I’m left to wonder … if Oscar isn’t really interested in people, is it really ok to attribute Oscar’s curling up to the terminally ill to some sort of sympathetic desire to comfort the dying?
Maybe he really likes being in a building with a bunch of weak old people.
…In fact, maybe he’s getting really pissed off that he goes through all the trouble of staking these people out and is then removed from the room before he can eat them.
Just sayin’ is all.
July 25th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
You know, I feel sorry for anyone the cat genuinely likes…
Can you imagine waking up to that cat on your bed after this story?
July 26th, 2007 at 8:41 am
Was anyone else disturbed by this?
“She was convinced of Oscar’s talent when he made his 13th correct call. While observing one patient, Teno said she noticed the woman wasn’t eating, was breathing with difficulty and that her legs had a bluish tinge, signs that often mean death is near.”
I mean, you notice the symptoms and you what? Sit there and let the cat purr at them? Of course, it doesn’t say she DIDN’T call the doctor or the family or that they didn’t do treatment or something, but … I kinda got the feeling that once the cat sits with them, they just give up on the person.
July 26th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Self fulfilling prophecy anyone?
“Oh, man. That dude’s a gonner. That cat’s all curled up on him.”
“But, doctor… he’s suffocating because the cat is blocking his airway! If we pick up the cat, he’ll be fine!”
“Nurse, who’s the doctor here? The cat curled up. He’s dying. Let nature take its course.”
July 26th, 2007 at 8:57 am
I don’t know about y’all, but this warms the cockles of my heart. Black and shriveled though it might be.
July 26th, 2007 at 9:10 am
I recently read something about training dogs to spot illness in patients’ (or their owners’) breath — from general ill health akin to what the cat is doing, to falling insulin levels, etc. Pretty amazing what these critters can distinguish . . .
July 26th, 2007 at 9:16 am
dogs have been used to help people with epilepsy for a long time… they can detect when a seizure is coming on and lead the person to safety.
July 26th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Ya, but those dogs are *trained*.
I’m suspecting more than a little selection bias here.
July 26th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Know that word’s gotten out among the patients, I suspect a nocebo (opposite of placebo) effect could take place.
“Oh dear. Death cat. I must not be long for this world.”
*is convinced death is near. body plays along. patient dies.*
July 26th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Ahem. “Know” = “Now”. My bad.
July 26th, 2007 at 10:56 am
WIZARDS CAN SEE ME, AND CATS.
July 26th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Bonus points to wareq for the discworld reference above!
July 26th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Oscar is sucking out the patient’s last remaining bits of lifeforce. HE IS A SKINWALKER!!!
July 26th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
On a more serious note, yes acm - my sister and nephew are puppy raisers for Guide Dogs for the Blind. One of the Labradors they raised was moved into a trial program with a diabetic woman. When the dog senses the woman’s insulin levels are low, it alerts her. Pretty amazing.
July 26th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
Having a metaphysical bent to my personality, I find this fascinating. However, the simple explanation is that the cat can smell the oncoming corpsification, and is most likely convinced that the person’s next meal will be a freebie.
July 27th, 2007 at 3:57 am
Yeah, Im pretty much down with the idea that the cat has his own ways of telling when a person is likely to die, just like the people trained there, and he just uses them. Not like the poor little bugger has got much else to do if he lives there.
July 27th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Dr. Taco — I’m really curious how trainers can train a dog for something like epilepsy or diabetes. I mean, unless things have changed, I thought that epilepsy was something that we can’t monitor for — we have no way of know when a seizure is about to happen with our current technology. And blood sugar can be measured but only in a rather invasive way. So how does a trainer now how to train a dog — in advance — to pick up on “seizure imminent” and translate that into “get human out of traffic” when the trainer can’t necessarily pick up on the antecedent to “get the human out of traffic” themselves?
I guess the only answer I can think of is really sick and wrong, like they hire epileptics who have regular, set-your-clock-by-them seizures… or they use blinking lights or something to trigger an epileptic’s seizure.
Or it could just be a different means of training. I hope it’s that.
July 27th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Mighty Ponygirl, my friend’s brother has seizures, and their dog would always know when he would have a seizure and come running to help him (not that he did much) even though he’d never been trained. If he (dog) couldn’t get to him (brother), because he was locked in a different part of the house or something, he’d [i]still[/i] know and would bark like crazy. I have no idea how dogs know this things, but I think trainers just train them by keeping them around epileptics and then showing them what to do when a seizure happens.
July 27th, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Marle — that’s the interesting thing about it — I mean, it’s good that the dog shows concern and tries to protect their human, but I’m just fascinated that a dog could innately have such a high cognitive function to say “My human is about to have a seizure, he’s in the middle of crossing a road, I have to get him to the other side so that a car won’t run over him.” That’s the sort of things dogs are trained for. Once the seizure’s started, there doesn’t seem like much that can be done … it’s a little late to make sure that the human is safely across the road.
July 28th, 2007 at 11:44 am
“I’m really curious how trainers can train a dog for something like epilepsy or diabetes.”
Don’t know about diabetes, but we had a dog who could tell when my husband’s blood sugar dropped. (My husband is an insulin-dependent diabetic.) On four separate occasions, my husband’s blood sugar dropped when we were asleep, and our dog woke me up. She wasn’t trained, and she wouldn’t do it during the daytime (evidently considering that to be my shift), but she was absolutely responsible for saving my husband’s life on four separate occasions. I have no idea how she figured it out, or what clued her in, although I suspect she smelled something- but this dog was notorious for a poor sense of smell, at time we had to point out the scraps of food we dropped because she couldn’t find them. I don’t know.
But she saved his life. Four times.
July 29th, 2007 at 10:52 am
Soul Hunter!
July 29th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
This is a hilarious view as to what Oscar’s motivations might be…. and could be completely true! I can so see it - and might be why he paced and meowed if he were locked out of the dying person’s room. (”hey! I called it first!”)
That being said, my dad is a diabetic, and he had a cat that would wake him up at night if his blood sugar started dropping to dangerous levels. (and no, she wouldn’t wake him up at night otherwise, she just slept in the crook of his arm) She saved his life many times by doing that.
She passed away earlier this year. RIP Gorby.
July 29th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
I think they train the dogs to help people that have siezures, (drag them away from danger, alert someone else). Some of the dogs they train to do this also anticipate the siezures, but this is something the dogs figure out for themesleves. Dogs can be a lot more alert than humans to small things - maybe smells, or some small beheaviour they learn always happens before the siezure that the patient in unaware of themselves.
July 29th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
I sat with my mom for several days before she died. I noticed that there was a “yeasty” smell in the air around her. Not disagreeable in any way, somewhat like bread rising. No-one else remarked on this.
Perhaps the cat smells something that most humans can’t. And it may be that he likes the aroma, therefore the curling up on the bed.
July 29th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
God Bless kittycats!
August 16th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
For all the people who have posted about the insulin detecting dogs: I was really wondering what breed of dog was it? Hope you reply.