Brian Myers knew he was in trouble when he fell to the floor. He had no feeling on his left side and couldn’t stand up in the crawl space between his bed and the wall.
“It was really frightening — I couldn’t get up and I didn’t realize at that moment that I’d had a stroke,” he said. “My cellphone was on the dresser about 15 feet away, but there was no way I could get to it.”
Seconds later, Myers, 59, felt something wet and rough on his face: his dog’s tongue.
Sadie, the 100-pound German shepherd he had rescued from an animal shelter near his Teaneck, N.J., home last fall, was standing above him with a look of concern on her face, he said.
“She kept licking me and crying, so I reached my right hand up to pet her, then I grabbed her collar,” recalled Myers, who had gone to bed just two hours before he fell on the evening of Jan. 16.
He was stunned by what happened next, he said.
Sadie backed up and began pulling Myers inch by inch out of the crawl space, and then wiggled toward his dresser.
“She was not trained as a service dog, but she was in distress over what was happening and she could tell that I was in trouble,” he said. “I don’t know how she did it, but she knew.”
Five minutes later, he was in front of his dresser and was able to reach up about three feet with his right arm and retrieve his cellphone to call for help, Myers said.
At Englewood Health hospital that night, Myers was given an MRI that revealed he’d suffered a stroke. Doctors told him it was likely that his four-legged companion had saved his life.
“It was the best decision I’d ever made to adopt her,” said Myers, who came home last month and has much of his mobility back, thanks to physical therapy. “I really feel it was meant to be.”
Another serious illness led him to adopt Sadie — a dog that nobody else seemed to want — at the Ramapo-Bergen Animal Refuge in Oakland, N.J., last September.