Cat which predicts death

Why rain on his celebration? I agreed reluctantly; it was unlikely that the cancer would return. When the relapse appeared, it was a full-on deluge.

Two months after he left the hospital, S. The pain from these lesions was so terrifying that only the highest doses of painkilling drugs would treat it, and S. His mother pleaded with me at first to give him more chemo, then accused me of misleading the family about S. I held my tongue in shame: Doctors, I knew, have an abysmal track record of predicting which of our patients are going to die. Death is our ultimate black box. In a survey led by researchers at University College London of over 12, prognoses of the life span of terminally ill patients, the hits and misses were wide-ranging.

Some doctors predicted deaths accurately. Others underestimated death by nearly three months; yet others overestimated it by an equal magnitude.

Even within oncology, there were subcultures of the worst offenders: In one story, likely apocryphal, a leukemia doctor was found instilling chemotherapy into the veins of a man whose I. But what if an algorithm could predict death? Identifying patients in the narrow, optimal time period, Avati knew, would allow doctors to use medical interventions more appropriately and more humanely.

And if the algorithm worked, palliative-care teams would be relieved from having to manually scour charts, hunting for those most likely to benefit. Avati and his team identified about , patients who could be studied.

Donna Richards told Dosa that she felt guilty for putting her mother in a nursing home. She felt guilty for not visiting enough. After three days, a nurse persuaded her to go home for a brief rest. Despite her misgivings, Richards agreed. Her mother died a short while later. January 31, pm. Oscar has an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die.

When the two-year-old grey and white cat curls up next to an elderly resident, staff now realise, this means they are likely to die in the next few hours. Such is Oscar's apparent accuracy - 25 consecutive cases so far - that nurses at the US home now warn family members to rush to a patient's beside as soon as the cat takes up residence there.

He seems to understand when patients are about to die," said David Dosa, an expert in geriatric care who described the phenomenon in the New England Journal of Medicine. They appreciate the companionship that the cat provides for their dying loved one," Dr Dosa added.

Dosa said the story of Oscar, who is now nearly five years old, initially had sparked a bit more interest in families wanting to send their loved ones to Steere House.

Oscar has even been thanked by families in obituaries for providing some comfort in the final hours of life. But he said Oscar remains unchanged by the attention, spending most of his days staring out of a window, although he has become a bit friendlier.