Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Medical Alert Cats

I have mentioned in earlier posts that I have been plagued with a lot of mini-strokes, or TIAs. I am still having that problem, but I am getting some help with it from my cats. 

I can not always tell when I am having a stroke for a while. My older cat seems to be able to tell when I am having a stroke long before I know. He has started letting me know. He may have been doing it longer than I knew about. I only realized what was going on very recently.

I have read about cats and dogs alerting people to someone having seizures, but this is the first I have known about any animals alerting to strokes.

Since my older cat is very old for a cat, 23 years old, I was thinking that it would be good if the younger cat would learn this also. 

Today, the younger cat demonstrated that he can already alert to strokes and he even had to do even better at it than the older cat.

I have had at least four TIAs today. It can be hard to keep count with so many because it is difficult to separate when one ends and the next one starts. I think I got overlap today.

The older cat was alerting a lot of the day today. Since cats have to sleep most of the time, he had to take breaks. 

During one of the older cat's breaks today, the younger one took over. I guess they decided to do shifts, or something.

The younger kept standing a little ways off from me and yelling at me. I got up to see what his problem was and he led me to a bag of aspirin that I had not put away after getting some out to put in my daily medicine boxes. 

One of the things my doctor told me to do for my health is take aspirin when I think I am having problems. I had already taken my evening dose of low-dose aspirin, so I wasn't planning to take any more. My cat thought otherwise. lol.

That really weirded me out. I did not realize that the younger cat knew what goes on around here that well. I also had no idea that he knew about strokes, or could communicate so clearly. I am still having a hard time believing that he even knows what aspirins are and when it might be a good idea for me to take some.

I am fairly used to the idea that animals know a lot more and can learn much more than most people expect. This incident has even managed to shock me. I am still trying to adjust to this new knowledge of what my two cats are able to do. 

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