Kevorki-Kittie Performs Deathly Cat Scans

Well, beam me up Scottie I have seen it all now!

This furry feline is Oscar. Oscar lives in a nursing home in Rhode Island and has a penchant for predicting people's passing.

He apparently was adopted as a kitten and has grown up in the nursing home's 3rd floor dementia unit. The staff soon noticed that Oscar would make his rounds going room to room checking on patients and would snuggle up with those patients who would wind up dying within hours. The staff says he is not normally friendly with the (long for this world) patients and only seems to be intimate with those who are about to shuffle off their mortal coil. The staff reports that Oscar is very accurate in his prognostications and families of those who are about to die take comfort in the cat's companionship with their loved ones in their final hours.

What gives Oscar his ability to sense imminent death? No one knows for sure, he may be able to pick up scents or there may be behavioral cues from the staff. The cat's talents are so impressive however, that Dr. David Dosa, a professor of medicine at Brown University and a geriatrician, has written an article about Oscar that appears in today's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. (NEJM Website) No Kidding. I couldn't make this up. OK, maybe I could; but I'm pretty sure that my version would involve: drug use, governmental cover-up conspiracies, appearances of the Virgin Mary, and maybe even bestiality. (It's a scary place inside my head hehehe)

You need to be a subscriber to read the entire article online at the NEJM website, but you can read CNN's coverage of this story here.

I will be very nervous from now on when my cat decides to snuggle up with me in bed!