How a Street Cat Became a Woman's Lifesaver

Thirty years ago, a woman named Sue McKenzie from England adopted a stray kitten she found on the street, even though her husband was against it. "I had to bring him in," she recalls. "He looked so miserable and abandoned."

For years, she fed him inside her home, and he grew up with several other domesticated cats. But Tom, the stray kitten she picked up from the street, was different from all the other cats she raised. "Tom was always independent and didn't like staying indoors. He would come to eat, but most of the time he roamed the streets."

Over the years, Sue learned to understand and interpret her cat's odd behavior, until 2014, when Tom began to act strangely. "During the times he spent at home, he started incessantly touching my right shoulder, and I know him well. This wasn't just casual contact. It was a sort of rubbing. He would touch my neck with his paw and howl loudly, almost to the point of crying. It broke my heart. I didn't understand what was wrong with him."

Tom's sad howls continued for two whole weeks, until one day Sue decided to look into it.

"It disturbed me so much that I took him to a veterinarian we didn't often see, and I just said, 'Help me.' I explained Tom's behavior and was surprised when the vet assured me he had no medical issues. This frustrated me even more."

Then the vet, half-joking, half-seriously, suggested, "Maybe he's trying to tell you something."

Sue, a hospital nurse by profession, was sensitive enough to read between the lines. "I thought to myself, 'What do I have to lose if I get checked out?'" she says. "Sure, there was no logic to it because of a cat, but that's what I felt I needed to do at that moment."

Indeed, for a hospital nurse, what was asking a favor from a doctor in her department? That's what she did, and thus a mysterious lump was discovered on her right shoulder, which turned out to be cancerous. "The doctor discovered it was Hodgkin's lymphoma and sent me immediately for surgery. I also had to undergo several rounds of chemotherapy, but since it was caught in time, I recovered. I've always believed animals have a sixth sense for detecting things like this, and today I truly think and feel that Tom's intuition saved my life."