Making Rounds with Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat - By David Dosa Page 0,23

job that required me to be a detective. Science is, among other things, an art of detection. I felt that I had to get closer to the heart of this mystery.

“So, where should I begin?” I asked.

“I’d start with someone you trust,” Mary prompted.

“Donna Richards?” I asked.

“I can’t think of anyone better!” she said, perhaps a little more self-satisfied than was necessary.

I hate it when she’s right.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Cats always know whether people like or dislike them.

They do not always care enough to do anything about it.”

WINIFRED CARRIERE

TO SAY THAT I TRUSTED DONNA RICHARDS WAS SOMETHING of an understatement. It was like saying that Sherlock Holmes trusted Dr. Watson, or that Captain Kirk trusted Scotty to run the engine room.

As any doctor will tell you, good office managers are worth their weight in gold. They manage large staffs, stay one step ahead of government regulations, and make sure that important phone calls get returned. They see that the billing is current and that everyone gets paid, and make sure we don’t run out of supplies—everything from tongue depressors to copier paper. Office manager is one of those thankless jobs that only gets noticed when something goes wrong. That may be why it can be such a difficult position to fill. I know that’s why we snapped up Donna Richards when she, quite literally, landed on our doorstep.

Donna had brought her mother into our office one morning for an appointment and happened to ask one of my colleagues if we needed an office manager. She had recently returned to Rhode Island after fifteen years in California to take care of her parents and needed a job. Talk about synchronicity.

During the three years we worked together, Donna and I would often chat long after my patients and the rest of the staff had gone home. We would sit together in my office as we finished up paperwork. She’d ask me about my newborn son, offering the kind of parenting advice you couldn’t find in any medical manual. In turn, I’d ask her about the balancing act she performed every day as a single working mother with the added responsibilities of caring for a parent with dementia. It was during those evening talks that I first saw the complexities of dementia care through the eyes of a friend. Donna opened up to me about the compromises she made in leaving her career to return home to take care of her mother. She spoke of the difficulties of navigating the health care system—one that she knew well from her days as a senior health care executive—to ensure that her mother had high-quality care. It was Donna who introduced me to the term “sandwich generation,” and it was from her that I began to really understand what it’s like for the millions of Americans caught between raising kids and caring for elderly family.

Now I hoped she could help me once more by giving me some much-needed perspective on Oscar. But first we had to catch up. It had been two years since Donna left our office for another job and over a year since her mother had passed away with Oscar by her side. We had a lot of ground to cover.

“IN THE WEEKS AFTER my mother died I would wake up in a cold sweat.” I was sitting with Donna in her suburban home outside of Providence. “My mother would come to me in my dreams,” she continued. “She was younger, the way I remember her from my childhood, and she would look up at and accuse me: ‘I wanted to go to the hospital but you didn’t let me…If you had just sent me to the hospital.’”

Donna looked up at a far-off corner of the ceiling, as if the movement itself would keep her from crying. She took a drag off her cigarette and let the smoke waft up through the air.

“David, I know how much you hate my smoking,” she said with a smile.

I rolled my eyes but said nothing. It’s not my place to come into someone’s home and tell them to stop smoking. I do that enough in the office.

Donna considered the cigarette again and then stamped it out in the ashtray. “After one of those dreams I would sit in bed for hours, trying to talk myself out of what she had said. I knew she didn’t like the nursing home, or at least she didn’t like it when she could still process things. You have to realize, putting her