Diabetic Alert Dogs – and Safety’s Sake

I read a post on a forum for people with service dogs the other day that I found really troubling.  The poster was saying how her service dog in training was smarter than she’d thought.  She’d discovered her dog’s intelligence recently as she was driving along and her dog jumped from the back seat into the front seat and began barking and bugging her.  She didn’t know why her dog was behaving that way but she finally pulled over onto the side of the road to try to figure it out.

No sooner had she pulled over, when she passed out.  She thinks it was due to a rapid and significant drop in blood sugar.  She woke up to her dog licking her face.  She had a granola bar in the car for just such occasions so she ate it and felt better.  She was delighted that her dog had alerted her that her blood sugar was dropping.  She seemed to think she was telling a story about what a wonderful dog she had.

I was horrified.  If her blood sugar drops so much so fast that she passes out before she realizes what’s happening, she shouldn’t be driving a car. 

I have a condition called reactive hypoglycemia, which means that sometimes my blood sugar spikes and then crashes.  Most of the time I control it by watching what I eat.  If I eat too many carbs without enough protein, my sugar is likely to crash.  There have been times it’s been very, very low, as low as 37.  I’m surprised I was able to stand up, walk to my kitchen, fetch my glucometer, and test my sugar that time.  But I’ve never passed out from it.  I can tell when it’s dropping and I know what to do when that happens.  I eat something that contains some sugar and some protein, like a protein bar.  I don’t believe driving is dangerous for me because I have always recognized what was happening before passing out and if I am driving when it happens, I eat something immediately.

But this woman apparently does not recognize the symptoms of her sugar dropping.  She’s happy with the idea that her dog can tell her if it’s happening so that she can pull the car off the road before she passes out and wrecks her car, but she was also surprised that her dog was able to do that.  So she was driving without the expectation that her dog would alert her if necessary.  She was putting herself in danger, putting her dog in danger, and putting everyone else on the road in danger.  Apparently she sees nothing wrong with that.

When some other members of the forum expressed concern about her driving, she explained that she doesn’t drive alone because it’s not safe.  She only drives when her dog or her husband is with her.  She did not explain whether or not her husband also alerts her to drops in her blood sugar, like her dog does.  I’m thinking he probably does not, in which case I’m not sure why she thinks it’s OK to drive if he’s with her.  She’s just endangering him then.  And again, she seemed surprised that her dog alerted her to the drop in blood sugar, so I don’t understand why she had been feeling safe to drive if the dog was with her.

Even if her dog does prove able to reliably alert her to changes in glucose levels (and alerting her one time does not prove he can do it reliably), it sounds risky to me to rely on a dog to do that when you’re driving.  If the dog makes a mistake, which could happen, and she passes out behind the wheel, both she and her dog could be killed.  So could other people on the road.  I was just amazed that she thought all this was OK.