Book profiles furry angel of death

PROVIDENCE: The scientist in Dr David Dosa was skeptical when first told that Oscar, an aloof cat kept by a nursing home, regularly predicted patients’ deaths by snuggling alongside them in their final hours.

Dosa’s doubts eroded after he and his colleagues tallied about 50 correct calls made 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 Dosa,

but he finds Oscar’s real worth in his fierce insistence on being present when others turn away from life’s most uncomfortable topic: 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,” Dosa said. “He was there when they couldn’t be.” Dosa, 37,

a geriatrician and professor at Brown University,

works on the third floor of the Steere House, which treats 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 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 newspaper death notices and eulogies.

“Maybe they’re seeing what they want to see,” he said, “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. 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 the staff — including Dosa — know it’s time to call family members when Oscar stretches beside their patients, who are generally too ill to notice his presence. 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 streak was broken. Turns out, the medical professionals were wrong, and the patient rallied for two days. But in the final hours, Oscar held his bedside vigil without prompting.

Dosa does not explain Oscar scientifically in

his book, although he

theorizes the cat imitates the nurses who raised him or smells odours given off by dying cells.