Guide Dog Saves Blind Handler After Sensing Blood Sugar Crash

Joe Mauk never wanted to rely on a dog. Strong and independent, the 46-year-old from Brookville, Pa., saw a pup as a job — one that required grooming, care and attention. But as his vision faded and nerve endings in his fingers and toes failed — a result of his longtime Type I Diabetes — Mauk decided to give in last year and accept a 2-year-old Labrador retriever named Roxanne from New York's Guiding Eyes for the Blind. And that decision saved his life.

A few weeks ago, Mauk and Roxanne were headed out for their evening walk. "She wouldn't get in her harness, and kept laying down and putting her head on her legs," Mauk tells PEOPLEPets.com. "They tell you in training that sometimes a dog will test you to see what your limits are, so I wrote it off as that." Finally able to coax his pooch outside, Mauk made it a few hundred yards when he started to feel confused and dizzy. "I just dropped," he says. "My blood sugar crashed. It was pretty much a crawl back to my house — I was fighting for consciousness."

Roxanne took control of the situation, licking Mauk's hands, dragging him by her leash and staying by his side throughout the ordeal. "I remember getting my front door open, but from there it went blank," he recalls. "When I came to, a syringe of glucagon still in my leg, I was saturated from sweat — and from Roxanne licking my face and arms. I'd never felt her react to anything that way before."

For an entire week, Roxanne stayed extra-protective of her pal, keeping in constant contact wherever he went — from the bed to the bathroom. "Now, I've never felt safer in my life," he says. "She has one eye open all the time."

Guiding Eyes trainer Stephanie Koret tells PEOPLEPets.com she's never had a student report something of this magnitude before. "It's nothing we train the dogs for," she says. "But I believe they are so much more intelligent and intuitive than we give them credit for."

Koret also thinks Roxanne prompted a positive change in Mauk. "He has a tough-guy exterior, but was never that way with Roxanne," she says. Indeed, Mauk has been through a lot: working extremely physical jobs, undergoing complex organ transplants and serving as a caretaker for his mother (also a Type I Diabetic), not to mention the vision and nerve-ending loss. But Roxanne has given him a new outlook on life. Now, he visits childrens' hospitals and the local YMCA with his pup, teaching kids about the benefits of guide dogs. He also feels he's become more open with strangers, as opposed to clamming up as he used to when he relied on a white cane to get around.

"I never thought I'd be trusting my life to this incredible animal," he says. "If all this hadn't happened to me, I wouldn't have met this amazing dog. She makes me feel like things happen for a reason."

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Kate Hogan