Paddock’s Picks: Making Rounds with Oscar

Editor’s note:  Anita Paddock’s review of books we should read are scheduled to appear on the second and fourth Friday of each month. Enjoy.

review by Anita Paddock
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It seems like we’ve had a plethora of animal books to hit the library shelves, but this one caught my attention, and when I read the inside synopsis, I was hooked.

This book is about a nursing and rehabilitation hospital in Providence, R.I., named Steere House. It sounds like a very innovative and pretty nice nursing home. Most of the inhabitants suffer from Alzheimer’s, and the staff believes animals have a beneficial effect on human health and psychology. They first realized this when Henry came to stay.

Henry was a stray cat who ventured into Steere House when it was being constructed into a hospital. He stayed for 10 years and became a favorite of the staff and residents. He looked for warm, sunny places to lie down, sometimes even riding the elevators from one floor to the other. Eventually, the staff noticed him bumping into things, and often he would wander away, and get lost outdoors for hours until a search party found him. He became like one of the patients with dementia. Eventually, he started showing other erratic behavior, and he rode in the elevator every day, just riding up and down, up and down, all day long.

After Henry died, the staff and residents attended his funeral service, complete with a handmade coffin. When the service was over, everyone agreed that Henry had changed the culture at Steere House. Thanks to him, the hospital adopted six more cats. The cats were added to make Steere House feel like a home, but the cats made everyone feel like part of a family.

It is the cat, Oscar, that this story is about. It’s told to us by Dr. David Dosa, a specialist in geriatrics. It was first printed as an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine, so it has that validity to it.

Dosa tells us about Oscar, and that when the cat senses someone is near death, he jumps into the bed with the sick person, licks his or her feet, and then stays until the person dies.

One anecdote about Oscar concerns Donna, the daughter of a woman who was a patient at Steere House. While she slept in a recliner as her mother lay in the bed dying, Oscar would jump into her lap, allow her to pet him, and then get back into the bed with her mother. A nurse persuaded Donna to go home and get some rest. While she was gone, her mom died. But she wasn’t alone; Oscar was with her.

In another instant, Oscar stayed with one patient until he died, and then rushed immediately across the hall to get in bed with another patient who soon died.

Dosa relates that he once heard from a World War II veteran who said he had been a medic on the battlefield. When he was dragging the injured off the battlefield, he could tell the ones who were going to die; those dying had a sweet aroma emanating from their bodies. There is a plausible explanation for the sweet smell of death.

Scientists say there is an elevated chemical compound released before death. Dosa thinks that could be what Oscar smells.

At each chapter heading, the author has famous quotes about cats. One was by Hemingway: “One cat just leads to another.” And this one by Leonardo Da Vinci: “The smallest feline is a masterpiece.” But the best one is by Sir Harry Swanson who says what all of us know, especially if we ever had a cat, “You can’t own a cat. The best you can do is be partners.”

•••

When Connie Ward was a little girl, living in South Korea, she read her neighbor’s books. She loved Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan, and Snow White.

“I read them over and over again,” she remembers. “I didn’t like Westerns, but, who knows, I might try them some day.”

She came to the United States when she was 16 years old. Married for 16 years, she has two sons ages 12 and 14.

“My greatest desire was to have my boys love to read. I think reading provides knowledge, wisdom, and comfort.”

She had not read the book about Oscar, but she had heard about it.

Connie is a registered nurse at Sparks Hospital where she works as an oncology nurse. She has worked there for the past five years, but she is on leave due to treatments she is taking for breast cancer.

“In my opinion,” she says, “I think animals, as well as humans, can smell or otherwise sense impending death. When I started as an oncology nurse, and grew close to the patients I cared for, I developed an instinct for, or maybe it was more like the smell, of  impending death. I don’t think of that as either good or bad, but it helps me prepare the family.

“People ask me all the time if I like working with cancer patients. I tell them I wouldn’t be anywhere else. Maybe I’m just like Oscar. I need to be with a person when he or she faces their maker.”