Share the Spirit: Meet the diabetic alert dogs who save lives

As Kathleen Fraser sits curled up on her couch in her San Francisco apartment, describing the daily challenges of living with Type 1 diabetes, her black Labrador Ransom reaches up a paw and pats her knee.

Fraser and Ransom lock eyes, and she wonders if he’s alerting her to a sudden dip in her blood-sugar levels. From her front pocket, she pulls out her insulin pump, which is connected to a continuous glucose sensor on her arm and displays her blood-sugar levels on a small screen. She shows Ransom that her numbers are in a safe range. “It’s OK,” she says.

Reassured, Ransom returns to his spot on the floor. But if he continued to give her “that look” and started drooling, Fraser would worry that he sensed something her device hadn’t. He was trained by the Concord nonprofit Early Alert Canines to be persistent in alerting her anytime he sniffs chemicals in her body that signal a worrisome rise or drop in her blood-sugar.

Fraser is grateful that Ransom regularly nudges her to look at her pump or to check in with herself on how she’s feeling. One of the “vicious” 24/7 realities of Type 1 diabetes is that it’s often hard to predict when a potentially life-threatening shift in blood-sugar levels will occur.

In addition to this added sense of security, 8-year-old Ransom also provides companionship and “the feeling of not being alone,” said Fraser, who lives in a small Panhandle apartment. “Having diabetes, because it’s invisible, it can be very isolating.”

Fraser was paired up with Ransom in 2016 by Early Alert Canines, which, since 2010, has located, trained and provided 78 medical alert dogs to adults and children who are insulin-dependent.

Clients receive the highly valuable service dogs for free, with EAC charging only for the rigorous application process and the clients’ training with their dogs. During those two weeks, EAC helps clients learn to care for their dogs, take them out in public and work with them on monitoring their conditions. Following a placement, EAC provides ongoing support and annual recertification.

Through the East Bay Times’ annual Share the Spirit campaign, which seeks to raise money for the most vulnerable in our communities, EAC hopes to raise $5,000. This amount would support EAC training and dog care and provide supplies to volunteer families who look after the animals before they’re placed with clients.

Most EAC clients have Type 1 diabetes, an incurable autoimmune disorder that prevents the pancreas from producing glucose-regulating insulin. Extreme lows or highs in blood sugar levels can cause a medical crisis, including diabetic coma or death. Over the long term, this chronic disorder can damage people’s nerves, kidneys, heart and blood levels and cause blindness. The better people can manage their conditions, the better chance they have to avoid these complications.

The technology for monitoring diabetics’ glucose levels continues to improve. But even with the most high-tech gear, Fraser feels better having Ransom around. Ali Dugger, another EAC client, who lives in Santa Barbara, feels the same way about her golden Labrador Dixie. Bringing Dixie into her life was a huge commitment, but she says Dixie is better at sniffing out changes in her glucose levels than her devices.

These changes are too subtle for humans to smell, but it’s been said that dogs, with their superior sense of smell, have the ability to detect odors at concentrations of around one part per trillion, the equivalent of detecting a teaspoon of sugar in two Olympic sized swimming pools.

Dugger has experienced Dixie’s olfactory gifts whenever she’s had her at the local pool where she swim laps. Even while Dugger is in the water, dozens of feet away, Dixie has alerted her to plummeting glucose levels. Dixie also saved her in a crisis one New Year’s Eve. While Dugger didn’t drink, she had skipped dinner, returned to her hotel and suffered a steep drop in her glucose levels while asleep. Dixie couldn’t rouse her. But as trained, Dixie alerted the person with her, who woke up and called 911.

Carol Edwards founded EAC after previously raising puppies for Guide Dogs for the Blind, some of whom weren’t temperamentally suited to working with people who have impaired vision. She was part of a project to assess the possibility of training these dogs to alert diabetics when they have hypoglycemia.

“When the body knows there is a blood-sugar problem, it dumps a bunch of chemicals to try and counteract that,” Edwards said. “(In a diabetic) those chemicals begin to circulate around the body and are emitted in sweat, the person’s breath or skin.”