Angel on a Leash (28 page)

The Angel by My Side

T
he Angel By My Side: The True Story of a Dog Who Saved a Man…and a Man Who Saved a Dog
is a book that I wrote with Mike Lingenfelter. It is the compelling, award-winning story of a 98-pound, red-haired, four-legged angel named Dakota (“Cody”), a story that encompasses health, science, spirituality, and the metaphysical.

Dakota changed people's lives, especially Mike's life. In 1995, Mike was ready for his life to be over and was even considering ending it himself. Two serious heart attacks and open-heart surgeries had taken away most of the good things in his life. His doctors still held out hope for him, and they were trying to find ways to motivate Mike to get out and exercise. Their vision was that an energetic dog on a leash might just do that.

And so it was that a Golden Retriever named Dakota, who himself had been rescued from death, came to help Mike with his rehabilitative therapy. Dakota had overcome many obstacles in life, from his beginnings as a sickly abandoned dog to his own battle with cancer. But, along the way, he became a heroic service dog.

Dakota became Mike's protector and best friend, saving Mike's life several times by alerting on Mike to warn him of oncoming heart attacks and unstable angina episodes, sensing them even before Mike himself could. Dakota's unique ability enabled Mike to take his medication early enough to head off the worst effects of the attacks.

With that, Dakota gave Mike back his dignity, his pride, and his life. With his attacks now under control, Mike was able to go back to his career as a highly decorated and sought-after engineer, designing radio communication systems for airports, mass transit systems, and other public carriers worldwide. Dakota came with him, watching over Mike vigilantly, and also, amazingly, saving the lives of a couple of Mike's colleagues.

Seeing Dakota's special gift, Mike readily and happily shared him with others through animal-assisted activities, seeing it as his duty to show the world the power of the human-animal bond. Their work included visits to pediatric patients in hospitals, to special needs children in schools, to a camp for kids with cancer, and to seniors in extended care. Dakota and Mike were widely recognized as a very special team, teaching lessons about hope and happiness and inner peace. They won many awards for their tireless efforts.

Ironically, after making all of these miracles happen for Mike and after giving so much to others through the years, ultimately Dakota needed a miracle for himself.

From the book:

 

After a while, the door to the exam room finally opened, and Dr. Krug waved us in. Dakota was sitting there, peacefully.

Dr. Krug had tears in his eyes. “I didn't want to be right. I wanted to find something else, but it's cancer.”

Thoughts fired rapidy through my brain:
Cancer?! Cancer now, after all he's been through? After all we've been through? How can this be? Where are you, God? How can you let this happen to him? All Dakota has ever done is help people. How can you do this to me, God? To us? To my family?

I was suddenly angry. I wanted to hit something. If Dakota has cancer,
I
have cancer.

“It's a death sentence, Mike,” Dr. Krug said, somewhere through my anger. “I'm not going to lie to you. You're looking at four to six weeks, maybe three months, tops. I didn't want to find a tumor, but here it is.” He put the x-ray up on the light screen. The tumor was the large white circle in the middle of the picture. It looked like a headlight coming straight at me, full speed ahead.

 

Within a week, we had gotten Dakota to the best place he could be. From the book:

 

There was little doubt that Dr. Greg Ogilvie was “The Man” and the Animal Cancer Center (ACC) at Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins was “The Mountain.”

If your dog or cat has cancer, this is the place to be. The ACC is widely acknowledged as the world's leading research and treatment facility for cancer in animals, and Dr. Ogilvie is the world's leading authority. The work being done on animals at CSU also had profound implications in the field of human cancer.

Nancy [Mike's wife] and I found out that Dr. Ogilvie was a great believer in the human-animal bond, which pretty much sold us on him before we even showed up there. We'd heard over and over again about his passion for his work and his compassion for his patients and their people.

Everyone we spoke to about him said he was a legend, larger than life.

He was even better in person.

We had a bit of an entourage as we walked through the door of the clinic that morning with Dakota—there was the three-person crew from
Good Morning America
lugging a TV camera and a boom mike on their shoulders, Dana Durrance from the Argus Institute's Support Program, Dr. Harold Krug, and me.

Dr. Ogilvie approached the group and introduced himself by saying, “Somebody here has to be Dakota's dad.”

“That's me, sir,” I said. We humans all exchanged a few pleasantries, and then Dr. Ogilvie got down on his hands and knees on the waiting room floor and greeted Dakota as if he were a long-lost friend.

“Hey, Dakota, how are you doing?” His hands were stroking Dakota's head, neck, back, and chest. I bet that Cody was already feeling better. He did a quick initial exam on the floor, checking his vital signs and the like, and then led us back into an exam room.

I already knew that I was seeing the best in action.

“How are
you
holding up, Mike?” he asked me.

“It's pretty rough, Dr. Ogilvie,” I told him. “I can't lie to you—this big guy means the world to me, in many different ways.”

“First of all, call me Greg. You are now part of the family here.”

Yes, he is the very best,
I thought.

“Cancer is an emotional disease, Mike. It steals hope, and once you lose hope, your life is violated and you feel totally out of control.”

He was right about that.

“By the time people get to us with their pets, they're scared to death. They're afraid that there are no options left for them and their pets, that it's time for the holy water ”

I could understand that. “Things do seem a little grim—three months to live kind of got our attention.”

“Well, let's not kid about this,” he said. “Cancer is the number-one natural cause of death in dogs and cats in the US. As for the type of cancer that Dakota has, the average dog will live only a few months unless they get some prompt care.”

I was sitting down with Dakota's head in my lap, trying unsuccessfully to hold back the tears. I've never been good at that when it comes to Dakota.

Dr. Ogilvie saw my emotion and tried to reassure me. “Remember, I see more lymphoma in a couple of weeks' time than most practitioners do in a lifetime. That gives us a real advantage. Believe it or not, cancer is the most curable of all common diseases.”

I'd never heard anyone say that about cancer, and here I was hearing it from the world's leading authority. I was riveted to Dr. Ogilvie's words.

“There isn't a single patient that we can't help,” Dr. Ogilvie continued, “and we're going to help Dakota. We're going to get him back to you with a minimum of downtime, ready to be back in your life soon. We've come a long way. Back in the day that I was educated, there were very few options for cancer patients. The mentality was that cancer is a disease, that you either cure it or you die of it. The reality today is that it doesn't have to be that way anymore. If we can't cure it, many cancers can be controlled for a long period of time.

“And why is that so hard to grasp? We're now defining
cancer
as a chronic disease. You think nothing of having a heart valve replaced if you have heart disease, or getting a kidney transplant or dialysis if you have renal disease—the comparisons can go on and on. We can put cancer in remission. It may take time, and it may require a number of different treatment modalities that can be difficult, but the truth is that we can do something here, much more than just make the patient comfortable in preparation for death. We don't accept that. That's not what we do. So there you have it, Mike. That's my pep talk, and now it's time to get to work.”

My heart was pounding away—but it must have been pounding in a good way, because Dakota wasn't alerting on me. I wanted to jump up out of my chair and shout, “I believe!”

 

As the battle raged, Mike discovered, through the help of an animal communicator and his own observations, that Dakota was a spirit guide, a guardian angel seemingly here on Earth to watch over Mike. From the book, the following is the first encounter between Dakota and Dr. Brenda McClelland (animal communicator) in Colorado. Mike and Nancy were there to observe.

 

[Brenda] got down on her knees next to Cody as he sprawled on the floor, closed her eyes, and held her hands over him. Immediately, he started inhaling in such a way that his chest was raising a good 6 inches with each breath, which, by itself, was already pretty amazing. I stole a look at Nancy and saw that her eyes were open wide in disbelief, but we both sat quietly. It seemed like an eternity, but it was in reality only about four or five minutes until Brenda opened her eyes and dropped her arms. Cody's breathing quickly returned to normal.

“Wow,” she said. We waited for more.

“I feel bizarre telling you this,” Brenda said. “I don't know your background, I don't know what you believe, but this is not a dog. This is a spirit guide in a dog's body.”

“What's a spirit guide?” I asked.

“Well, some people might think of them as angels—they follow us around and sort of hang around up there in the subconscious and help us. My Catholic upbringing won't let me call them angels, because I think of angels as unattainable.” She paused. “I knew it the moment I connected with Dakota—there was so much energy there, it was different from an ordinary animal. It really hit me, and I knew right away that he was a spirit guide.”

Nancy and I weren't much help here. We didn't know what to say.

“I've come across spirit guides many times before,” Brenda continued, “hanging around in the subconscious, but this is the first one that I've found actually residing in an animal or a human. I suspect that there could be others around, but this is the first time I've seen it in thirteen years of doing this. Spirit guides are all around us, floating about—some people might call them guardian angels. They sometimes save your life and then disappear, but Dakota chose to take a physical form that was going to be here for a lifetime before moving on.

At that point, Nancy jumped in. “What's he doing here?”

“He's here to protect Mike and watch over him. Dakota is his guardian angel.”

No one spoke for a moment while that sank in. Finally, Nancy broke the silence. “Where did he come from?”

“I asked him, and he said, ‘I am not from this material world.' He sounds a little cocky to me, but I've heard that attitude before. Here on Earth, we're kind of lagging behind in the spiritual world.”

“Why is he here as a dog?” I had to ask.

“He said he specifically came as a dog hoping to get people to see animals in different light, as spiritual beings. He wants to raise the status of animals in society, to show that they have consciousness, too, that they're more than dumb creatures. So in a sense, the dog has a larger purpose in mind, and he's using you to get his message across. He says that this is going to be hard for a lot of people, because in most religions, people have dominion over animals.” Brenda took a deep breath. “I'm going back for more.”

We witnessed the same scene once again, only this time it lasted a little longer. I'd never seen anything like this. Cody was taking in so much air that I thought he was going to raise up off the carpet. This time Brenda delivered our message to Dakota. He responded by telling her things that only he and I knew about, things I'd never even shared with Nancy.

“Dakota says that you need to stop worrying, that he knows that you love him. He wants you to stop worrying about him, and he doesn't want you to think about the same kind of stuff that you were thinking about that first night back in Dallas at the hotel.”

I knew exactly what Brenda was talking about. Dakota and I had gone to Dallas to start work, and Nancy was going to join us later. The night before my first day back on the job, I was having some misgivings about going back to work, the move, and life in general, and in the hotel room, I spoke to Dakota about it. He never answered me … until now.

Brenda said that she found Dakota to be extremely down-to-earth, and based on his vibration, she felt that he he'd been around for a long time in other forms. She called him a wise, old soul.

 

In spite of Dr. Ogilvie's best efforts and Dakota's courageous battle, the end came too soon—a year and a half later—in October of 2001. With Mike always at the other end of the leash, Dakota had shown others how to live with dignity and, at the end, how to die with dignity.

Dakota's legacy is huge. Whether he was making children smile or take a step or talk, or helping senior citizens find a final peace, Dakota was truly a very special dog. More than a dog, actually, he was an angel with a very special power to help those he touched.

Dakota and Mike were named 1999 Service Dog Team of the Year by Delta Society. Dakota was elected to the Texas Veterinary Medical Foundation Animal Hall of Fame, chosen as Humanitarian of the Year by the Sertoma Club of Dallas (the first non-human recipient in history), and inducted into the Alabama Veterinary Medicine Association Animal Hall of Fame.

Dakota's story has been featured on
Good Morning America,
the USA Network, the Discovery Channel, and the PAX Network; in the
Seattle Times,
the
Dallas Morning News,
the
Denver Post,
the
Huntsville Times,
and the Knight Ridder newspaper syndicate; and in the book
The Healing Power of Pets
by Dr. Marty Becker.