A Diabetes Alert Dog for Vivian

Two and a half years ago, our daughter, Vivian, was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. Our vivacious, energetic girl was now faced with the daunting task of figuring out blood sugars and how to be a pancreas while maintaining a normal life and her high level of activity. While we have a continuous glucose monitor, we are realizing that technology alone is not enough to keep her safe and her sugars sometimes drop too quickly for the monitor to catch. There have been too many times the past few months where her blood sugar levels have been in range according to her monitor and we check and find her blood sugar is actually in the 20s or 30s (ideally, it should be 80-150). The levels she has been at usually cause seizures and can result in a coma. We have held our girl's limp body while we gave glucose gel and prayed that it acted quickly enough to get her blood sugar back to an ok range. The scariest part is that Vivian doesn't feel her lows and says she is "fine," even in these dangerously low ranges. 

After these scares, we decided Vivian needed an extra layer of protection. We researched alert dogs and the amazing service they perform of detecting low and high blood sugars. We believe that having a diabetic alert dog will help catch lows before the technology alerts us and may even help Vivian become more aware of her body and what she is feeling when she is low. We want our daughter to have as normal a life as possible with her disease and this is one step to obtaining some normalcy.

Because basic training for an alert dog takes a year or more, a significant amount of money is needed to purchase one. We will need to travel to get the dog and stay for a week in the town where the training facility is to learn how to interact best with her dog, learn the alert signals, and finalize training specific to Vivian. We are hoping to have enough money raised to travel this summer so Vivian won't have to miss school for the training. We appreciate any amount you can donate to help us get our sweet girl the help she needs!