A visually impaired Kidbrooke woman says she has a medically astute moggie who has learnt to alert her to oncoming seizures.

Kim Ward, 50, of Holburne Road, was left in a wheelchair after a bus crash in 1999 and suffers from seizures – and then she started losing her eyesight in 2011.

She relies on Pickles, her faithful feline, to keep her company and help her out around the house.

She told News Shopper: “We trained him to sit, stay, wait, and lay down. We taught him like you would a dog.

“When my phone rings he will go stand next to it so I can find it – I don’t have any peripheral vision but I can see him against certain surfaces from certain angles.

“He’s a bit like a guide dog.”

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But when she and her husband Keith Ward, 55, started teaching Pickles a few token tricks, they never expected he would develop such a savvy set of skills.

This prescient puss has taught himself to predict when his owner is about to have a fit - and he does his best not to keep quiet about it.

Mrs Ward said: “Pickles will do his utmost to warn me that a seizure is due and will stay with me all the time until I’m safe.

“He will claw the furniture or run around to make noise when he knows I’m going to have a seizure.”

Mrs Ward doesn’t have epilepsy but has suffered from the sudden attacks since her accident, with mild seizures happening every day and more serious ones every couple of weeks.

If a severe seizure happens unexpectedly, she could lose consciousness, fall and seriously hurt herself, so when Pickles rings the alarm, she goes to lie down until the danger has passed.

Dogs can be trained to assist patients with epilepsy who suffer from seizures and it is thought that they do this using an ability to detect minute changes in their owner’s biochemistry.

But the concept of a trained tom is unheard of – and Mrs Ward insists this wasn’t one of the tricks she and her husband taught Pickles.

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Mrs Ward said: “I’ve mentioned it to doctors and they have heard of dogs sensing it because of chemical smells but not cats.

“We haven’t taught him that – he did it himself."

And now she’s immortalising her crafty cat in a series of children’s books which will tell his story.

She hopes to use the books to address issues which children find difficult to talk about, such as living with disabilities and adoption – as Pickles lost his own mother soon after he was born.

What started off as bedtime stories for her niece are now being published.

She said: “They will tell the story of how Pickles found a new family, going from a tiny little unwanted kitten to being trained commands and then detecting my seizures.”