SOMETIMES, YOU’VE JUST GOT TO DO WHAT’S
A devoted and clever family pet is proving to be a blessing for a teenager and her family
required in order to get the dog you want. Especially if you’re not old enough to be making such a big decision for yourself and your family. For eight-yearold Katie Gregson, that required getting approval from both her parents. Katie’s mother, Christine, was fairly easy to persuade, though; she can’t help feeling maternal towards small living creatures, so Katie simply kept showing her photographs of puppies until she caved. Her dad, David, was a bit harder to crack. He’d had a dog before – a border collie – and when she died, he swore he could never go through that anguish again. So when his daughter began begging him for precisely that breed of dog, he didn’t think he could do it. No, he said, again and again, a difficult word for a doting father to say.
Katie adapted and upgraded her campaign. She started getting stuffedtoy dogs and sticky- taping them around their home. She taped stuffedtoy dogs to the microwave, to the TV, to the wall. Meanwhile, she kept on nagging, begging and pleading for a border collie pup to call her own.
She was determined – and she persisted until the job was done. It took two years, but eventually David agreed to get a dog. A border collie puppy, even after all of David’s promises to himself to the contrary.
And so it was that sweet, wiry Pip came to live in the Gregson family home. Katie was ten when she first went to see Pip, an eight-week-old bundle of puppy who tumbled towards her, all tiny, tentative legs and wet button nose. Pip was there with her brother, who promptly ignored the Gregsons. Pip, however, tottered straight on over to Katie, Christine and David when they arrived, obviously choosing, as dogs so often do, the people she’d live with for the rest of her life. Katie adored her from the moment they met, and, really, they haven’t spent much time apart since.
Katie’s now 17 and Pip is more than just a pet. Around the time she got Pip, Katie and Christine had read about diabetic alert dogs. These dogs are specially trained to detect when their human has either low or high blood sugar levels. They learn, over time, to alert someone when they smell a change in that person’s blood glucose levels, to prevent them from having a hypoglycaemic (low blood sugar) and hyperglycaemic ( high blood sugar) episode. A couple of years after she arrived, Pip started learning.
Katie lives with type 1 diabetes. She was diagnosed with the condition at two years old, making her one of the youngest patients to ever be diagnosed with the condition at her local hospital. At the time, of course, she didn’t have a way to properly communicate that she was feeling unwell or say what was the matter, so Christine and David despaired every time she’d wail.
Eventually, she came into the hospital in a critical condition – diabetes can be extremely dangerous when it’s left untreated. She had dangerously high blood sugar because her body was not producing insulin. Later, she’d have wildly differing highs and lows in blood sugar.
While she was a child, Christine and David were in charge of administering her insulin, which they did with the jab of a needle multiple times each day. When Katie reached her teenage years, she started looking after herself. She’s fiercely independent, she says, and it’s been important to her for years that she is in control of her own condition. Type 1 diabetes is an auto-immune condition, so the incarnation of the illness has nothing
to do with her lifestyle choices. It’s because her pancreas doesn’t do its job, and can occur in anyone, however fit or healthy. Katie has to regularly check her blood sugar levels, maybe ten times a day, pricking her little finger and then using a small remote control to administer the correct amount of insulin into her blood stream via an insulin pump that’s embedded in her skin. While she can eat what she likes, she has to be doing the maths on how much insulin she’ll need to counteract her latest snack. It’s tough, but so is she. For someone so young, she’s resilient and determined and calm.
Katie has some help ma n a g i n g her condition now, though. At f i rst , she had planned to keep Pip just as her companion. She taught the pup all the basic obedience commands, so Pip’s a tremendously well-behaved dog who sits, stays, waits and comes at the utterance of a particular word. Pip can do more than 50 tricks, too; such as weaving between your legs or jumping over you. By the time she got Pip, Katie had watched a lot of the television show, Britain’s Got Talent, and was inspired by the clever dogs who’d do various tricks, so she set about training her own show dog.
Soon after, she started doing a bit of research into diabetic alert dogs. There wasn’t much informat ion around at the time. She found a video on YouTube in which someone had taught their dog to smell whether the owner had high or low blood sugar levels. Katie watched the clip obsessively, taking inspiration for her own training regime.
Katie set about training Pip to tell when something was wrong with her blood sugar, all by herself. She followed the protocol from the YouTube video, which meant making samples of her saliva when she had high and low blood sugar. She put some of her saliva on cotton wool pads – one taken when she had high blood sugar, one taken when she had low blood sugar – and she placed them each in a small pot. She put those pots in the freezer. Then she’d take out the pots, show them to Pip and reward her with praise and a treat every time she showed any interest in the pot. She kept doing this every day for six months.
Her first objective was to encourage Pip to be curious about these scent pots. From there, she prompted Pip to make a fuss when she smelled the pots, and rewarded her for every
Diabetic alert dogs are specially trained to detect when their owner has either low or high blood sugar levels
bark or squirm. Then she’d hold the pots up to her mouth to indicate to Pip that the smell was associated with her. Over a period of about 18 months, Pip learned to detect that smell, associate it with Katie and alert someone when she smelled it. When she was ready, Katie got rid of the pots and knew she could rely on Pip to sniff out any change in blood sugar. When Katie was younger, the idea was to get Pip to alert Katie’s parents if her blood sugar was too high or too low so they could come and help.
Kat ie was 13 by the time Pip knew how to sniff changes in Katie’s blood sugar and alert Christine and David.
Katie has her waking hours covered. She checks herself constant ly when she’s up and about during the day, so she doesn’t rely on Pip so much then. It’s at night time, when Katie’s asleep, that Pip does her most important work. Pip lies curled up in her own bed in Katie’s bedroom, and basically stays half-awake all night, alert in case there’s a change in Katie’s smell. If she smells a shift in Katie’s blood sugar, she belts out of the bedroom, scampers down the stairs, pushes open the door to Katie’s parents’ room and waggles from one side of the bed to the other until one of them wakes up and goes upstairs to help. She doesn’t bark, but instead places her body in their personal space until they take notice. She’s also found out that whacking her thick tail against the wardrobe is an effective, noisy way to rouse Christine and David. Once they’re awake, they go into Katie’s room, wake her and get her to adjust her insulin to prevent her from slipping into a coma or needing further help.
Pip could, presumably, be trained to wake Katie, now t hat Kat ie’s old enough to deal with insulin administration herself, but Pip’s entrenched habit is to seek out Christine and David and make the alert. She does it when they’re all at home together and awake, too. If they’re lounging around at home in the evening and Katie’s blood sugar changes, Pip will jump onto one of them and stand with her full weight on their belly or chest or lap until they get up to help Katie.
David says that he and Christine are woken by Pip at least once a week these days, so it’s an extremely helpful and important routine Pip’s got going. She’s basically a shift-worker, awake during the night when
At night time, when Katie’s asleep, Pip does her most important work, constantly on the alert for changes
everyone else is asleep, constantly on alert for changes in Katie’s blood sugar. When Katie gets up in the morning, Pip gives herself permission to sleep. She curls up and snoozes through half the day, often not getting out of bed until noon. She can be slow and groggy throughout the day, taking the time when Katie is at her new job to recover from her evening guard duties.
It was difficult training Pip. There were days when Katie almost gave up, days when it seemed like a patently ridiculous idea that this could ever work. She did give up, once, for three weeks. She just decided that perhaps Pip wasn’t cut out for this kind of work, that perhaps it wasn’t going to be possible, after all the hours they’d spent trying to learn together. And that’s exactly when it clicked for Pip and she started to understand what she had to do. All of those hours finally paid off, and she showed Katie and her family what she could do.
It was life-changing to have someone who can watch over Katie at night when she’s sleeping. That’s when some of her most severe and dangerous episodes happen, so it’s invaluable to have a four-legged night nurse on duty each night in her bedroom.
Katie had a lot of time for dog training through her school years because she was home-schooled from the age of 11. When she was growing up she had a chronic pain condition that affected her shoulder and arm as well as the type 1 diabetes, and her school