LOS ANGELES — A picture posted to Facebook of a sleeping boy and his dog has gone viral thanks to the mother’s caption explaining how the dog keeps the little boy’s diabetes in control.
The picture, posted on the Saving Luke-Luke and Jedi -Fighting type 1 Diabetes Together Facebook page, shows 7-year-old Luke asleep with his dog, Jedi, awake and looking straight at the camera. Luke’s mom Dorrie Natrall, is holding a blood glucose monitor in the corner of the photo with the number 57 displayed on the screen.
“This may just look like a dog, a sleeping boy and a number on a screen, but this, this moment right here is so much more. This is a picture of Jedi saving his boy,” said Natrall in the post.
Natrall told CNN Luke was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes when he was two-years-old.
The Natrall’s got Jedi shortly after Luke was diagnosed. He is trained to detect when Luke’s blood sugar goes above or below normal range, something that happens between five and eight times a day. Jedi waves a paw if Luke’s blood sugar is high and bows if it is low.
In the Facebook post, Natrall said five minutes before the photo was taken, everyone in the house was asleep.
“No alarms were going off, no one was checking blood, no one was thinking about diabetes, and it’s in those moments when our guards are down … things can get scary very fast,” Natrall said.
In the four years since being diagnosed with diabetes Luke has never woken up when his blood sugar was low.
For Natrall, that means checking Luke’s blood sugar overnight and relying on tools to constantly monitor Luke’s blood sugar. When the tools and monitors fail, Luke relies on Jedi to keep him safe.
On the night mentioned in the Facebook post, Jedi jumped on and off Natrall’s bed multiple times and laid on her when she didn’t wake up.
Natrall checked Luke’s blood sugar through his continuous glucose monitor and got 100. Jedi bowed and refused to let her go back to sleep, so Natrall pricked Luke’s finger and got the 57 reading.
“57 is way too low, and by Jedi’s behavior I guarantee he was dropping fast,” Natrall said.
Thanks to Jedi’s intervention, Natrall gave Luke a glucose tablet so his blood sugar would come back up and crisis was averted.
“Luke was laying right next to me, just inches from me, and without Jedi I would have had no idea that he was dropping out of a safe range,” Natrall said.
Natrall hopes her Facebook post will raise awareness about type 1 diabetes and the struggle families go through to deal with it.
“Type 1 diabetes is relentless and we need as much help as we can get,” Natrall said. “If we don’t share our stories how would anybody ever know that this is what my son and millions of others go through every single day.”