At a recent adoption event, Sienna – a 3-year-old lab and pit bull mix – made a beeline for a man she’d never met and gently placed her paw on his leg.
“She saw him, and she started pulling on the leash very hard, which is not normal for her,” said Jackie Poppe, a volunteer with Friends of Campbell County Animal Control in Rustburg, Virginia.
The adoption event was held at a church yard sale, and there were several booths with different vendors. Sienna, who needed a permanent home, was going from booth to booth greeting attendees – until she locked eyes with one man and headed directly for him.
Poppe tried to pull Sienna away, but she would not leave the man’s side. That is when the man’s wife – who had been shopping nearby – turned around and noticed something was wrong.
“He looked like he was definitely going to have a seizure,” Kristen Davis said about her husband, Josh Davis, who has epilepsy. She said he appeared unwell and looked off-balance, the telltale signs a seizure could be imminent.
That day, June 7, Josh was also showing signs of a myoclonic seizure – his eyes were fluttering and jerking, his wife said. He had forgotten to take his morning meds.
Josh, 46, stands 6-foot-9, his wife noted.
“He is a big guy, so we didn’t want him to fall in front of all those people,” Kristen said, adding that they live around the corner, and that she brought her husband straight home to lie down and take his meds.
He managed to avoid a full seizure – which Kristen believes was because her husband relaxed, and his self-administering vagus nerve stimulator probably delivered a stimulation burst. Josh has a vagus nerve stimulator – a device meant to help control seizures – implanted in his chest, though it doesn’t always stop them.
“If he hadn’t calmed down and went home to rest, even with the VNS, he was very likely to have a full-on convulsion seizure,” Kristen said.
Sienna was rescued as a stray on the streets of Altavista, Virginia, Poppe said, with no known training in seizure detection. Scientific studies have found both trained and untrained pet dogs can detect seizures, mainly using their sense of smell. Some canines can detect certain compounds in a person’s sweat during or before an epileptic seizure.
“We all knew she was lovable, and she was cute and amazing in the shelter, but we did not know that she had this ability,” Poppe said.
Kristen credits Sienna with preventing her husband from having a full seizure that day.
“She was honed into him, just the way she went straight to him and ignored some other people on the way,” Kristen said. “It seemed to me like what you see in the movies, when a dog alerts people.”
She said she couldn’t believe how fixated Sienna was on her husband.
“When he moved over a few steps, she did, too,” Kristen said. “She put her paw on his leg again.”
Josh was equally struck by the dog’s intuition.
“I was really surprised that Sienna came to me, and it made me take my health more seriously that day,” Josh said. “I would have took her home right then and there if Kristen had agreed.”
Kristen said they have three rescue and don’t have the bandwidth to bring home another.
“I have my own health issues, and we just can’t take that on,” she said.
After the shelter shared a Facebook post about how Sienna detected Josh’s seizure, adoption requests flooded in.
“We’ve always known Sienna is special. But today, she reminded us that sometimes the ones we rescue are the ones who end up rescuing,” the post said.
Several people with epileptic family members applied to adopt Sienna, but they all had a problem in common: They also had cats, and Sienna doesn’t get along well with them.
“Cats would not have been a good fit for her,” Poppe said.
One application stood out. Shannon Sweeney had applied to adopt Sienna before she even saw the post about the seizure detection. She said she was drawn to Sienna because she looked like her late dog, Johnwood, who died last month at 11 years old.
But after reading about Sienna’s instincts, “it made us want her even more,” Shannon said. Her son Ransom, 28, has epilepsy – though he has not had a seizure in several years.
“The timing has been unbelievable,” said Shannon, adding that her other son, Ethan, 24, was grieving after losing his pet rabbit that week and that he had taken Johnwood’s death especially hard.
“The companionship for him is such a big deal,” said Shannon, who lives in Roanoke.
Shannon and her husband picked up Sienna on June 13, and “she is settling in really, really well,” Shannon said. “We’re soaking it all up right now.”
Since arriving, Sienna has not left Ethan’s side.
“The bunny went everywhere with him, and now Sienna, not as conveniently bunny-sized, goes everywhere with him,” Shannon said. “Sienna is filling holes in our hearts.”
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