Alert/service dogs

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Aaron_

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After using the search feature and finding very few first-hand accounts of their dog 'predicting' or warning their owner of an oncoming seizure I wanted to see if I could get more answers by starting a new and specific thread

I live alone, and 2 weeks ago I found myself on the kitchen floor & I had a pretty solid black eye on the corner or front of the stove, a friction/rub burn where my shoulder blade dragged down the front of the stove and also almost bit off my tongue. 2 weeks later and there is still a small knot on it. I'm very lucky I was using the oven to roast and wasn't using the stove top. Had I been 'warned' I could've turned off the oven and gone to lay on my side. I am now seriously considering adopting a dog if I can feel confident that it will help before or during a seizure and be more than a furry companion. After dealing with injuries for the last 20 years from falling down without warning it'd be nice to have fewer of them.

Like everyone else here, I have been told that most dogs can pick up on this. I am not necessarily skeptical, I have had dogs as pets before (my epilepsy had not manifested quite yet at that time, so the dogs I lived with wouldn't have noticed anyway), but I would like to ask a larger community of people like all of us here about their experience, not the supposed experts that we all meet in real life that know nothing about what we go through or even how a seizure starts and why. How many times have we all heard "You know what you really need is ____" which is always the lead-in to unsolicited medical advice from people with no professional training.

So, back to the main point, how many of you found your dog to give a warning and the chance to stop what activity you are in the middle of?
 
Hi Aaron,

I'm sorry to hear that you had some hard seizures. In regards to the dog I don't have one but I live near Cornell University that has a wonderful vet school and I found out that the dog can smell a chemical our body gives off 10 min. to 1 hr. before the seizure happens and depending on how they are trained they will either put their paw on your leg or lay down by your side and spread out trying to protect a person in case they fall.

I had a student in school who had a service dog, the student had a nervous disorder and the dog would bark each time the student got worked up for no reason. In turn the do helped the student to be calm and the student is doing great and not worrying so much any more. I wish you the best of luck and May God Bless You!

Sue
 
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