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at your service
BY MARA BOVSUN, AKC Family Dog
| Yet, on summer days, you can find this19-year-old happily splashing around in the pools and lakes near her home in Monument, Colorado. Noelle can dive into the sport she loves because she has a personal lifeguard. He’s Sully, a gentle year-old Newfoundland, who has been trained to keep his eyes on her at all times and to spring to rescue if she has an attack. “He gives me independence,” Noelle says. Now Noelle is trying to help other epileptic youngsters achieve the same kind of freedom she enjoys. Together with her mother and father, Tina and Dave, she has founded Noelle’s Angel Dogs, a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing service dogs, at an affordable cost, to people with seizure disorders and other disabilities.
The organization is just over a year old, but in a way, Noelle has been preparing for it since the moment she was born. “I heard the doctor say, ‘She has a knot in her cord,’ ” Tina says, recalling the first moment she knew that something was wrong with her daughter. The new mom got only a glimpse of her baby as nurses whisked her away to intensive care to try to save her life. “She was blue,” Tina says. Noelle pulled through, but it was soon clear that she was not developing normally. From the time she was about 3 months old, she was a regular visitor to the neurology department of the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, in Stanford, California. (At the time, her family was living in Fresno.) Drugs were the first line of treatment, but they didn’t work well for Noelle. The doses that controlled her seizures caused serious side effects. Noelle lived her life under a magnifying glass, always under the watchful, worriedeyes of her parents or another adult. At school, she had to have a hired aide at her side, all the time. If she took a shower, she had to leave the bathroom door open, so someone could listen for the sounds of trouble.
Such scrutiny might be acceptable to a very young child, but by age 10, Noelle had had enough. Her mother found herself fielding insistent questions, like “Do you have to leave that video monitor on in my room?” and “Can’t I take a shower without the door being open?” Tina had no idea what to do until she saw a 1999 article in the Santa Cruz County Sentinel about service dogs for epileptics. “This was our introduction that these dogs even existed,” Tina says. But getting a dog wasn’t easy. The Rivero’s contacted six organizations training seizure-response dogs. Noelle was too young, the groups said, and there was a long waiting list already. Ten at the time, Noelle would have to wait more than a decade before getting a dog. “That was just not acceptable,” Tina
says. She contacted representatives of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. They gave her the bad news: There was nothing they could do to compel any organization to provide a service dog for an individual.
But there was one small up note. The law allows people to train their own seizure-response dogs. Good news, indeed, except that no one in the Rivero family had any dog training experience. “She needed some privacy and independence,” Tina says. “The only way that was going to happen was if her dad and I learned how to train a dog. There was no other choice.” They immediately signed up for training classes to learn how to train a service dog. Within two years, Noelle had Scarlet, a Golden Retriever, trained to go to school with her, carry medications, protect her in the event of seizure, and to get help. It did not take long for Scarlet to learn the signs, often missed by human eyes, that a seizure was coming.
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©NELEVY PHOTOGRAPHY
This skill, called seizure alerting, usually cannot betaught, but many epileptics report that even pet dogs, with no specialized training, have figured out on their own how to spot signs of trouble in their owners. With Scarlet’s talent to alert, and a vagus nerve stimulator (VNS), which is like an implantable pacemaker for the brain, Noelle had reduced the frequency of her seizures from three or four a week to maybe one or two a week. The dog would give warnings about 45 minutes before the event, giving Noelle a chance to activate her VNS (which she does with a magnet) or call for help. “I would say five to seven times a year Scarlet saved my daughter’s life,” Tina says. Soon after she got her first dog, Noelle,like many young girls, started dreaming of what she would like to do when she grew up. “I want to train dogs for people like me,” the little girl announced to her parents one day. Although she never mentioned it again, she apparently held on to the dream for years.
Shortly before her high-school graduation, she told her parents, “It’s time.” They had no idea what she was talking about. “It’s time to start our company,” she explained. By this time, Scarlet was ready to retire, which meant Noelle needed to train a new dog. After some research, she discovered Newfoundlands. She was intrigued by their devotion to their people, their webbed feet, and their tendency to leap into any available body of water. But there were other considerations. “I thought Holy cow! They are incredibly adorable,” she recalls. And, she’s discovered, highly trainable. Sully has passed the public-access test, and Noelle says that he has already started warning her in advance of her seizures. His signals? He’ll lick her face, or jump up and down on her bed. In the first year, Noelle’s Angel Dogs, which works with volunteer puppy-raisers and experienced trainers, graduated two dogs. Currently, they have eight more in various stages of training, and are expecting to have two more enter the program in the coming months.
The dogs are required to pass several tests (including the one created by Assistance Dogs International) and master several skills, such as hitting a 911 button, pulling a wheelchair, and fetching medications. Dogs must come back to be tested every year. One tradition that they’ve established is an annual six-day field trip to Disneyland, to help the teams deal with the hustle and bustle of a busy amusement park, including fireworks and waiting on long lines. Long term, the Rivero’s hope to establish a training facility, with a campus, kennels, and a staff veterinarian. For Noelle, the biggest reward is seeing dogs help people like her. “Before I had the dogs, I had a lot of fear,” she says. “I love having him around. He’s a miracle.”
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