Luke Nuttall, a 7-year-old diabetic patient, was saved by Jedi, his diabetes-sniffing dog, while his family was in deep sleep.
Jedi, the black Labrador, owned and trained by the Nuttall family, has been designated with an important task of keeping an eye on Luke, a small boy with serious case of Type 1 diabetes.
On the fateful night when Jedi saved Luke's life, he woke his parents from their deep sleep as Luke's blood sugar levels were falling dangerously low. Trained to signal the parents, Jedi was unrelenting when he jumped on the bed over and over again until his mother, Dorrie Nuttall, realized that something was not right, she wrote in a Facebook post. "The sleepy fog started to wear off and I began to think clearer. I suddenly was fully awake and I knew there was an issue."
When she examined her son's blood sugar levels, they were seriously low and falling fast. She quickly gave her son a glucose tablet to stabilize the blood sugar.
"Luke was laying right next to me, just inches from me, and without Jedi I would have had no idea that he was dropping out of a safe range," she wrote in her post that became viral. Nuttall uses Facebook and her website to chronicle her daily struggle and to bring the horrors of Type 1 Diabetes to light.
This incident not only highlights the dangers of diabetes but also a medical marvel: the ability of dogs to smell diabetic patients and how well they are able to detect their condition.
As James Walker, former director of Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, told PBS, an animal's sense of smell can overcome ours by a factor of 10,000 to 100,000.
This ability has been chronicled by the nonprofit organization, Dogs Assisting Diabetics Foundation, which trains dogs to make them diabetic-alert. However, this practice can be very expensive; patients may have to pay as much as a $15,000 adoption fee and an additional $1,000 for other expenses.
However, for patients like Luke, this could mean the difference between life and death. "It's in those moments when our guards are down, when we are just living life, when we let our minds drift from diabetes, that [the disease] has the upper hand-and things can get scary very fast," Dorrie Nuttal wrote in her Facebook post. "But thankfully we have Jedi."
