Help Maddux with a Diabetic Alert Dog!

Hi, My name is Maddux Hart. In 2016, when I was 9 years old, I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. This diagnosis changed my life dramatically. Diabetes is a difficult disease to manage. Since my diagnosis, I have learned many things can alter your blood sugar. Not only the food you eat but also exercise, hormones, stress, dehydration or if I get sick.

Sometimes it feels as if no matter how hard I try to keep my blood sugar in normal range it doesn’t work and all my efforts are for nothing. Thankfully, I have had my brother Rylan and my parents (Justin and Erin) to help me keep my blood sugar in the right range. With their help, I have learned what I need to do to control my diabetes to keep me heathy.

Even now that I know what I need to do it is not always easy.

When my blood sugar goes high or low I feel really crummy. When my blood sugars are high, I feel like someone knocked me out and I just woke up. I get a bad headache, feel nauseated and get irritable and angry. When my blood sugar falls low, it makes me feel extremely hungry and I get inattentive. I sometimes have difficulty tracking and following directions. After treating my low blood sugar and it returns to normal, I feel like I just woke up from a deep sleep and am very tired.

Night time can be the most critical for me because I sometimes drop extremely low and if my parents weren’t here to help me I could go into a coma or die. I use the latest technology offered to me like a Dexcom sensor but when I am low like at night time, I do not wake up to the alerts. My parents monitor my blood sugars and get alerts on their phones too when my blood sugar is to high or too low. They are then able to wake me and help me treat my blood sugar and sit with me until I feel better. When I’m at school or on an outing and my sugars fluctuate I try my best to treat it myself but if I don’t my parents text or call me. They worry about me and watch my blood sugars all the time too.

I love the outdoors and am always outside. I love baseball, basketball, hiking, biking, playing golf and hanging out with friends.

I am writing this in hopes you will help me raise money for a Diabetic alert dog (aka. . . DAD). The bad news is every place we have looked, service dogs are very very expensive and of course insurance doesn’t cover a service dog. But the good news is, I have been given a puppy that is one of the breeds they recommend to use for a service dog. So as soon as we can, we can get her evaluated and start the process of training her with a specialized diabetic trainer.

So here comes my question to you. . . Would you be willing to help me raise money to get my puppy trained to help me manage my diabetes? I feel a diabetic alert dog would help me be more independent and I will be able to take care of myself better. I learned about how dogs can be specially trained to know when a person’s blood sugar goes too low or too high and they notify the person that he needs to get treatment. So, they act kind of like a watch dog over you.

I will be graduating from high school in a few years and a dog like this could be my back up helper at college too if I don’t recognize a low blood sugar. My parents always worry about me so a diabetic dog would also help their worries too. The dog wouldn’t only be a diabetic dog it would also be my companion that walks the diabetic journey with me when I get down and frustrated.

Below are a couple links to help explain more about Diabetic Alert Dog’s and how they help people with diabetes. Thank you so much for reading my story and I appreciate you sharing it with others so I can reach my goal.

https://www.webmd.com/diabetes/what-are-diabetic-service-dogs#:~:text=%E2%80%8CSeveral%20scientific%20studies%20have%20found%20that%20diabetic%20service,than%20when%20their%20blood%20sugar%20level%20is%20normal.

https://diabetesjournals.org/care/article/36/4/e47/37911/Diabetic-Alert-Dogs-A-Preliminary-Survey-of