Who says cats are selfish?
A woman has her feline friend to thank for saving her life after she suffered a heart attack while sleeping.
Sam Felstead, 42, was asleep when she was awakened by her 7-year-old cat, Billy, at 4:30 a.m. Aug. 8 — and she immediately realized something was wrong.
“Suddenly I woke up in the early hours covered in sweat and couldn’t move,” Felstead told South West News Service, adding that she felt a shooting pain down her right side. “Billy was on my chest and was meowing loudly in my ear hole.”
The hero kitty — who is normally pretty placid and solitary — refused to leave his owner alone and was “really meowing,” so Felstead called out to her mom, Karen, for help.
Sam Felstead was lucky Billy was around as she slept. Tom Maddick SWNS“I was wet through with sweat and had really bad back pain and my right side felt really heavy and strange,” she recalled. “I couldn’t move it. I couldn’t stand up either and was very dizzy when I got up.”
Her mom phoned an ambulance but was told there was a two-hour wait, so she drove her to the hospital herself.
At the facility, Felstead was told she had suffered a mild heart attack and one of her arteries was blocked.
Felstead was discharged from the hospital after three days, and reunited with her savior — who she says showed little interest in her upon her return.
“He completely ignored me,” she said, adding that doctors told her it’s lucky she got to the hospital when she did.
“I have a lot of medication to take for life and I have to take it easy for six weeks,” said Felstead of her recovery. “I had to have a balloon in my artery to open it back up again.”
She said the cat normally doesn’t jump on people — making it unusual that he did so. Tom Maddick SWNS
The pair have been reunited, with Felstead saying he’s back to his old self. Tom Maddick SWNSAnd despite the lukewarm welcome-home greeting from her kitty, she said she’s thankful for Billy’s middle-of-the-night intervention.
“I’m grateful towards him as I didn’t know if I’d have woken up,” she added. “My alarm [wasn’t] for another two hours, so who knows if I would have woken up.
“I do think he saved my life and so does everybody else around me,” she continued.
Cat behavior expert Lucy Hoile told the BBC that Billy may have picked up on physiological changes in Sam.
“It could be that the fact he jumped on her and was meowing was a sign of his anxiety,” she said. “I do believe he probably did save her life because that’s what enabled her to get medical help, but I wouldn’t go down the route of saying he did it on purpose.
“It was him reacting to the situation.”
