Former British soldier Matthew Slater, 49, has been rescued after his pet cat, Wheeler, jumped into bed and scratched his face to wake him up during a fire at their home in York, England. He now considers her a hero.
“I remember trying to push her because I thought, ‘Why are you doing this?'” Slater recalled in an interview with the British newspaper. ” metro yesterday. “So I opened my eyes and saw all the smoke and thought, ‘Obviously she’s trying to get me up. I think it saved my life 100%, and I wouldn’t have woken up without it.”
The fire broke out in the dormitory kitchen, in the early hours of last Friday (29). Despite inhaling a lot of smoke and losing consciousness several times, Matthew was able to call 911 while trying to get out of the house through a first-floor window.
The fire brigade arrived just in time and managed to smash the door, get the ex-sold out, and put the oxygen equipment on him. He temporarily lost consciousness due to the smoke, and does not remember telling the brigade members about his cat Wheeler.
“I don’t remember doing that, but it looks like I tried to go back. But they obviously stopped me. So I was taken in the ambulance and I was worried about her,” Matthew says. He was in the hospital for five hours dealing with smoke inhalation when he received news from the police that his cat had never left the house and had died.
The house of ex-Soldier Matthew Slater was completely engulfed in flames.
Photo: Playback / GoFundMe
The man returned home with a broken heart and found everything destroyed by the fire. He was in the construction business, his home insurance ran out a couple of weeks ago and he thought about renovating it, but he didn’t do it in time.
Libby Bushby, a friend of the ex-soldier, created a cat on GoFundMe to help him by providing pictures showing the destroyed rooms. The goal now is to get £25,000, about R$189,000, to buy new furniture and rebuild the property. To date, 58 thousand Brazilian reals have been collected.
