Fran was an 82-year-old woman who decided to spend her last years in an old age home. She had a loving cat, Bandit, to keep her company in her unit. That night, she had already taken her cat out on his usual evening walk around her section, but Bandit was insistent. It was about 9:30 p.m., dark, and the elderly woman and her daughter Marilyn, who was visiting, were getting ready for bed.
The cat stopped at the far end of the building and was meowing down at something on the ground below. When Fran investigated, she heard someone calling out for help. In the small garden area on the ground floor a woman had fallen. At that end of the building, Mary had taken her dachshund Sugar out to take care of business. Once Sugar had taken care of business, Mary was about to go back inside her apartment with the dog “and down I went right by the entrance hall as you go in,” she said.
Mary is diabetic and her blood sugar had dropped to such a low level she ended up passing out. “When I come to, I could see my little dog in the grass right there coming to me and the next thing I know [Bandit, Fran and Marilyn] are there and I’m saying ‘help me,’ ‘help me’ and my dog didn’t fuss at the cat and the cat didn’t fuss at the dog.” Though an ambulance was called, Mary decided she didn’t want to go to the hospital. Fran and her daughter had taken Mary inside a neighbor’s apartment where she was able to drink some orange juice and recuperate from the fall.
Mary didn’t have any injuries from her fall, and for that she is grateful. She is also grateful that a cat perhaps sensed trouble and summoned its inner feline equivalent to Lassie. That Bandit and Fran and her daughter found her, she attributes to an act of God. “God works in mysterious ways,” she said. Of course, the Bible has plenty of stories in which animals act in the agency of God, and Mary said she believes this time that agent happened to be a cat.
