Alex’s dream
rescues woman
By PETER BOLTZ
Express Staff Writer
Alexandra Dougherty’s cat went missing on
Christmas Eve.
Christmas morning, about two blocks away
from the Dougherty’s home, Alice Rooney, 76, fell in her kitchen and
couldn’t get up.
Unrelated events?
Hardly.
Alex, 12, had a dream after she went to bed
the night of Dec. 26. She said she doesn’t recall what the dream was
about, but she awoke with a clear message.
"Go to Fourth Avenue and Pine
Street."
That morning Alex told her mother, Kirsten,
she was going to renew her search for Tom, her missing yellow tabby, at
Rooney’s address.
Kirsten didn’t think any more of it than
it was another day of looking for Tom. She headed in the opposite
direction from her daughter to cover more ground.
Having knocked on doors for the last two
days, Alex said, she didn’t think anything of knocking on the door of
Rooney’s house on the corner of Fourth and Pine.
"I heard a woman inside say ‘Who are
you, and what do you want?’ "
After identifying herself and her mission
to find her cat, Alex said the woman said, "I haven’t seen a cat. I
fell on Christmas morning and I haven’t been able to get up."
Alex said that after she failed to get in
through the back door as Rooney requested, she saw one of Rooney’s
neighbors walking outside.
She went over to him and asked if he knew
Rooney.
"Well," she said, "she’s
stuck in her house. She fell on Christmas Day, and I can’t get her back
door open."
The neighbor, who asked to remain unnamed,
came over, got the door open, and got Rooney up.
When Alex rejoined her mother, she told her
the story.
"Mom thought it pretty amazing, but I
didn’t think anything of it."
And neither one of them made the connection
with Alex’s dream. Kirsten said it wasn’t until later that evening
that she realized the revelatory nature of her daughter’s dream.
Rooney was hospitalized later that day by
her doctor, Randy Coriell, after the neighbor found that she had fallen
again.
From her hospital room on Tuesday, Rooney
said her doctors still didn’t know why her legs went weak on her, but
she was stable enough to return home.
"I’ve wonderful neighbors and
friends," she said. "I’m a very fortunate old lady."
Friends of the Dougherty’s, after hearing
of Alex’s dream and subsequent rescue of Rooney, joked with her about
dreaming up winning lottery numbers.
Asked if she did have any numbers in mind,
she said "Seventeen, seventeen, seventeen." She didn’t say how
to interpret those for Powerball.
Meanwhile, Tom the cat is still missing,
and Alex has asked for help in finding him. He is neutered and is wearing
a green collar with a pink heart ID tag.
