Miley: VA Medical Center's healing pet cat

Clark Wood plays with Miley near the nurse's station in the Community Living Center at the VA Medical Center in S.F. Clark Wood plays with Miley near the nurse's station in the Community Living Center at the VA Medical Center in S.F. Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle Photo: Leah Millis, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 17 Caption Close Miley: VA Medical Center's healing pet cat 1 / 17 Back to Gallery

Traumatic events arise every day at the VA, but none this year has been as traumatic as the day Miley got a toothache and had to be rushed away for treatment.

"When I carried him out," says social worker Lisa Dipko, "the whole place was distraught, because Miley is one of our people."

He is also an alley cat who has been adopted as the mascot and chief calming agent for the Veterans Affairs Medical Center at Fort Miley in San Francisco, hence the name.

Miley's domain is the Community Living Center, which houses the hospice unit and is usually the last stop for a vet. When a patient or his family arrives, the elevator opens and there is Miley, staring out from a purple pillow under a cushioned armchair. Or he is up on the chair itself. Or if a patient has presumed to take the chair when Miley wants it, he jumps into the lap of the occupant and expects to be stroked, which is what Clark Wood is doing on a Tuesday afternoon as fellow inpatient Pat Collins sits alongside, waiting his turn to receive Miley's attention.

"He is a character," says Wood, who has lost all his family and friends and was having a go at the bottle when he arrived here for an extended stay. Now he has reason to live - to entertain Miley.

"He calms me down," says Wood, who is 77, and wears sunglasses and an Air Force hat, though he is indoors and an Army veteran. The cat on his lap weighs about 16 pounds and from the back looks like he has some raccoon in him. Lore is that he came out of the woods behind the VA and walked through the automatic sliding door.

'Just wandered in'

"Someone told me he just wandered in one day," says Wood, using both hands to scratch behind Miley's ears, "and they kept him."

This raises an eyebrow on Anne Johnson, associate director of the Community Living Center, who is sitting nearby, also waiting her turn with Miley. Johnson doesn't want to spoil a good war story, though the truth is not as lurid as the vets like to tell it. The cat came via military procurement process as part of an effort to warm up nursing homes throughout the VA system.

"One of the things that makes things homelike is having a pet," explains Johnson. "We had to look at everything from where would the cat live, to how would we deal with patients and staff who are allergic or afraid of cats, to how does the federal government buy pet food?"

Once approval came down the chain of command, the San Francisco SPCA was asked to be on the lookout for the right cat. This one came by way of a housing project, having already served three rough years. To indicate he was feral, the top of his left ear was lopped off, putting him in sync with the amputees at the VA.

The cat in charge

He arrived in August 2010, and after a second committee was formed to bestow a name, Miley took charge of the nursing station outside the elevator. When he is not under a chair or on one, he does recon from a potted tree or atop a computer terminal. He also makes patient rounds, lacking only a white coat. Miley's means of checking on a patient is to jump up on the bed, preferably at the moment dinner is being served on a tray.

"He certainly will eat hospital food," says Johnson, who discourages patients from feeding scraps to Miley, in an effort to keep his weight below 20 pounds.

"He's cute as the devil," says Arnold Levagetto who is 87 and joined the Navy straight out of Galileo High School for what he calls "the Big War." He saw action in the Pacific Theater, and on this day he is seeing action from Miley.

"Animals are very good for patients," Levagetto says. "It's undivided love."

Incoming patients and staff who don't see it that way are assigned to the ground floor. Miley's domain is the first floor, and a sign at the elevator warns people not to let the cat come aboard.

But Miley has never attempted an escape. He doesn't trust elevators, and a motorized wheelchair will send him tearing down the hallway, a sight that always lightens the mood. Miley also likes to meet visitors at the elevator and follow them into a patient's room, which gives them all something to talk about.

Great with kids

"Sometimes it can be scary to be here to visit a relative," Johnson says, "so the kids really gravitate to Miley."

Miley's own room is a cozy closet that has been furnished to suit him. There is a cat tower, a cat bed, a cat box.

"It's better than a lot of apartments," says Johnson.

The room is off to the side of the dining room and looks to have once been a phone booth, with a window in the door. The door has been customized with a cat door so Miley can make his rounds.

Late one night, Miley was up on the bed of Collins when he noticed an irregularity in the man's behavior. The cat sprang off the bed and out the door to the room across the hall, which belongs to Wood. The door was closed, and Miley started mewling outside it.

"I'd never heard him cry before and I've been here quite a while," says Wood. "He was trying to tell me that Pat was having a seizure."

Patients are constantly rotating out of hospice, and it confuses Miley to go into a room looking for an old friend and see an empty bed.

"We've had some recent ones pass," says Johnson, watching Miley on patrol, "and he's trying to figure out what's happening."

On the night of Oct. 19, Miley made one of his usual visits to the room of Robert Perruquet, a Navy veteran from Daly City with terminal cancer. Perruquet's wife, Pat, was there and after a while Miley moved on, as is his style. But he kept coming back, in and out all night.

"I felt that Miley knew something," Pat says. He did. Her husband died at 8 a.m., at age 80.

The compassionate cat

Afterward Pat made her way to the elevator. She sat down for a moment to compose herself and Miley jumped into her lap.

"He was giving me his type of compassion," she says.

On the door of Miley's apartment is a list of eight names to contact in case of emergency. One of those names is Dipko, the social worker who calls herself "Miley's mom." She was the one contacted when Miley, the healer, was in need of healing.

"He was not acting himself and I thought, 'Oh my God, he has diabetes,' " Dipko says. It turned out to be six rotten teeth, which required a cat ambulance run, by chief geriatric nurse Candy Crider, to the Cat Clinic of Mill Valley. Veterinarians David and Craig Innis pulled six of the veteran cat's teeth. It took six months for the bill for Miley's oral surgery to be "vendorized" in the VA bureaucracy.

When Miley came back, all eight of those people on the list were assigned his case.

"The nurses had to give pain meds," Dipko says, "and they treated Miley like a patient. They were very dear to him."