About 10 months after my diagnosis, we adopted our sweet Maggie Mae, a stray dog that me, my mom, and my step-dad fell in love with pretty much instantly. Thinking back on my last two years of high school, I spent A LOT of time with Maggie. I think of watching shows before bed with my parents and I would lay on the ground with Maggie. She would lay in bed with me until I would fall asleep and then she would hop off and sleep on the ground.
If you have diabetes or if your child has diabetes, you know all about the 2am wake up and check blood sugar thing. That lasted for a while, bless my mom, honestly. My ‘honeymoon’ phase, where my pancreas is still producing some insulin before it completely shuts down, it lasted for what seemed like forever. So there was a period of time that I was dropping low what felt like every night. Dropping even into the 40s. Sometimes I would wake myself up, sweating and my heart racing and I know what was happening. But there were times I didn’t wake up. My body didn’t have the internal alarm yet.
Maggie woke me up. She would jump back up on my bed and lick me and nudge my with her nose and head until I would wake up.
We always thought what a God send… she was a miracle dog!! We figured she had to have smelled something different about me and knew it was wrong. As if she had noticed what I smelled like normally and then got conditioned to how I smelled when my blood sugar was low and it was bad. She learned so fast.
It wasn’t until I got to college that I learned that service dogs for people with diabetes was actually a thing. These dogs are trained to smell hypoglycemia, just as Maggie and learned to do.
Unfortunately, these dogs typically cost about $35-40,000.
There are non-profits that help with the financial burden of these service dogs which is AMAZING. And I honestly don’t know what the process with insurance is or would be, but the fact that out of pocket it would cost a years salary blow my mind.
All I know is that Maggie has saved my life, who knows if I would’ve woken up all those nights that she did it for me. But thank you, Jesus, for giving me a dog who has a diabetic sense. I genuinely feel so blessed by her and that somehow she ended up in my life.
So if you’re looking for organizations to donate to or volunteer with, consider finding your local diabetes dog trainer. There are options to volunteer, be a foster home, or make a donation to help people who do have diabetes be able to afford a dog that could help save their life.
We are undeserving of dogs.
HP