Diabetic Alert Dog team: Valerie and Lucy, Toledo, OhioI brought four month old Lucy home on Sunday, January 6, 2008. Only a little more then twelve hours later she started going to full time graduate school with me. In her adorable and tiny pink vest, Lucy curled up on her pink fuzzy mat and slept while I learned all about neural anatomy and exercise physiology. After a few weeks of hard work and training Lucy was waking up during my classes to alert to my high and low blood sugars. She started jumping on top of me every morning when the alarm went off and as a result I never missed a single class, exam or meeting which had been a constantly struggle for me solely because of turning off my alarms. Overtime she has brought my blood sugar average down from 287 mg/dl to 179 mg/dl and this average continues to improve. As opposed to the numerous grand mal seizures I’ve had in the past, I have only has one 2 minute long partial seizure since I’ve had Lucy.
Lucy does so much more then I ever thought possible. During my forty hour weeks on clinical working with a physical therapist she brought smiles to hundreds of patients, encouraged a man with a spinal cord injury to use his injured hands to pet her, retrieved golf balls for one of my stroke patients who was working on his swing and, was the highlight of physical therapy for a college student with a traumatic brain injury. When I developed a condition that causes low blood pressure and a very rapid heart rate Lucy learned to alert to the low blood pressure and lick my face repeatedly if I pass out so I regain consciousness quicker.
Lucy and I still have lots of work left to do but, I don’t mind the training. She saves my life everyday and takes a huge weight off my mind. She loves to gives hugs and hopefully she’ll say yes to being the ring bearer in my August wedding 