We got the chance to meet a truly amazing dog last week - a black lab named Adele.  My colleague, Mitch, met Adele and her owner Marty Harris, while walking his dog and convinced her to come by the Snif Labs office to share her inspirational story with the whole team.

You see, Adele is a service dog who is specially trained to be able to sense when her owner Marty is about to lose consciousness due to a rare heart problem.  Adele will alert Marty to sit or lie down BEFORE she actually faints.  Doctors don’t even understand how Adele is able to sense an oncoming episode (she can also sense things like oncoming seizures & low blood sugar in diabetics), but they think that dogs are able to use their more sophisticated senses of smell and/or hearing to detect very subtle changes that happen to a person before they have an episode.

Before Adele came into Marty’s life, Marty was frequently fainting and ending up in the emergency room, often suffering concussions.  Although Adele sometimes alerts her up to 20 times a day, she hasn’t fainted one single time since Adele has been looking out for her!!  We actually saw Adele alert Marty right in our office and I think Mitch put it best when he said that it “gave him chills”. 

Adele was trained by an amazing organization called Canine Partners for Life.  They train service dogs to help people with muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, spinal cord injuries, seizure disorders and more.

Click here for a recent article from the Boston Globe that goes into more detail about all of the ways that Adele helps Marty in her day to day life.

So far, Oscar hasn’t demonstrated any life-saving abilities, but we’re going to keep our eyes open - maybe he has some hidden talents that we just haven’t discovered yet!!

Thank you, Marty, for sharing your story with us and allowing us to share it with our readers.  We wish you and Adele all the best!

We also wanted to wish Marty’s son Ethan a Happy 9th Birthday!!  We hope you had a great time at Blue Man Group.  Good luck beating the Pokemon game!!