Serious is alerting to lows and highs

Serious is starting to show some regularity alerting to highs and lows. Tonight he alerted hubby about an hour before he went low. Last night he did the same thing. Hubby told me yesterday he is noticing more problems with unawares. He used to slip into comas a lot before he got his pump and sensor. We got Serious to prevent that from starting again and it looks like we made a good choice. Serious woke hubby up in the middle of the night because he was going low. Tonight he wouldn't quit again and an hour later he started going low. We often don't hear his sensor at night under the covers, or the sensor gets too far from the pump and doesn't alert properly. The other challenge we have is the averages are sometimes considerable higher than his low glucose level so hubby does not feel an urgency to double check his levels.

My notes may make it sound like having a pump and sensor does not work well. Please don't misunderstand my comments. Hubby hasn't gone so low to be in a coma since he got the pump but as his body builds up more resistance it may start again and we want to reduce the chances by having the dog as well.

He is Serious about his work

Serious has adjusted well to our family. When my hubby is not here he plays well with the kids. He has bonded well with my oldest son and follows him when my husband is not home and he is not working. We are not taking him in public yet because he is not ready. He will get fixed next week and then we will work harder at public access.

Serious does seem to understand when my husband needs help. We woke up a couple of nights ago because Serious climbed on the bed and onto my husband in the middle of night the other night. My husband was high and his sensor was dying. Serious was laying directly on top of my husband and looking him straight in the face and licking him. There have been at least two other occasions this week when my husband was high and Serious went over, got into his personal space and started licking his arm which we have been trying to teach him to do when my husband is high.

We are not sure about whether he is signalling yet for lows but we think he is. Earlier this week, my husband had eaten and given himself some insulin when Serious came over and started licking him. My husband was high but since he had taken some insulin he thought maybe he was dropping and that is what Serious was alerting to. We were going to check later but my husband did not mention whether he had to eat later because he was low from taking too much medicine. So I do not know for sure if Serious was alerting early to a low blood sugar. We will continue to monitor this.

Serious thinks work is play

Serious is a big kid who loves to play because it means he gets lots of attention. He is doing very well with basic commands but still having challenges with recall when out in public. I took him to the dog part yesterday to work with him in a large fenced in area. We have to work in an area where there are no other dogs so he doesn't become distracted. After about 45 minutes he settled down and decided to pay attention. I have decided that for awhile we need to do this type of workout regularly until he can do the recall no matter what.

Hubby has decided that the best way to work with Serious on the weekend is to leave his CG monitor off and just test regularly. This gives Serious a true chance to alert. I do not sleep as well when we are doing this but I feel a little better this morning. I noticed that Serious sleeps harder when hubby is snoring but when there is no snoring Seriuos is more alert and not snoring himself. Odd.

Hubby also thinks that he did alert once yesterday. Seriuos favorite game is find the meter. We keep putting it away and he keeps bringing it back. Of course he has to get praise for this! Hubby went low while they were intentionally playing "find the meter" but stopped and wouldn't go get the meter. He started to lick at hubby's arm. Hubby tested and was on the low side although he was not very low. Still he would have been considered low so it counts.

Well, off for training. We do free time first for about 45 minutes so he can settle down and run off any steam. Then we take a break for bit while I work with the kids on homework. Periodically, we take a couple of minutes to play a game with him during a homework break. A few hours later we have mroe serious training of basic commands with a potty break and then he can sleep for awhile while I get my work done. This seems to be the routine we are settling into. In the evening he works and plays with Hubby when he comes home from work.

He may be Serious but he is funny!

Last night my hubby was making our bed. Serious had to help. We only had the pad on and Serious jumped up. Hubby put the fitted sheet on right on top of him but he refused to move. The bed had this huge lump under the fitted sheet. Finally, Serious decided to get out after much encouragement. Hubby went to put the flat sheet on but when he turned around Seriuos was back in the middle of the bed.

To add to this, hubby went to take a shower and Serious followed, open the bathroom door and let all the cold air in then went over and pushed the shower curtain open. Next thing I know hubby is shouting (he wasn't mad just issuing a command) for him to "Out".

Serious is catching on to our method of training

Serious may have had a slow start out of the gate but he is catching up quickly. We reviewed the new touch command with the bell today and I can drop the command now and he will still do it relatively quickly. He will do it even when there is no food reward as well which is good. I know he truly knows.

Tomorrow we will add a bell to our front door so he can learn to ring it to go out to relieve himself. I am sure it will not take him long to pick this up.

Training news

Todays list:

sit
down
stay
touch (he touches a hand or object in the opposite hand of the food and gets the food)

leave it
find low (use touch method to get him to touch the low object)
kennel
come
light
meter

We have only done find low for touching the low object until this point but decided that I could expand on this if I made it touch. This way I could teach him to add different objects to his list. It took him about 15-20 minutes to figure out the touch but then he had no more real problems. Once he gets used to our method of training he should pick up his speed of learning.

Ginger on the other hand only took about 3 tries. She catches on very quickly.

Once both dogs got the touch I put a bell in my hand and had them touch the bell. Ginger caught on immediately and Serious only took a few tries to get the idea. Later I will add the bell to the door for them to touch and ring to go potty. We still do not know when he has to go potty really well. He is very subtle and quiet in his movements. He also likes to sit just in front of the door because of the cool draft so it is hard to tell if he is sitting there because he needs to go out or if he justs likes the draft.

Diabetes and acetone

New personal research indicates a connection between raised acetone levels and diabetes blood sugar levels. Does anyone know anything about this? I have been researching to determine if there is something specific that diabetic alert animals are recognizing specifically and it may be acetone levels. If levels are increased and the animal associates a disturbance in their behavior at this time and then rewards of attention then they may be connecting the dots and then alerting the human to the oncoming change because they are seeking the attention as a reward.

I also came across research indicating that new instruments are being investigated that can "sniff" acetone levels similar to alcohol levels. These instruments are supposed to be noninvasive, unlike meters.

Whew! Thanksgiving is over!

Well the hubby made it through the holiday without any major issues. We have some news. His mom got her first pump two days before thanksgiving. Apparently one of the major reasons was because of hypo unawares. Thanksgiving was a bit rough for her. She thinks her nurse educator gave her incorrect information about how much insulin to take and she was very sick as a result and didn't enjoy any of her thanksgiving meal.

Serious is doing well. We had to leave him for a day with my mother-in-law because my parents are not dog people and since we have no records at this point that he is doing his job we felt it best not to push this issue.

I don't remember if we told you guys that we have already got him trained to retrieve the tester. He is still doing it with pretty good accuracy. Now we can really get down to business with training. Daycare will be done within a couple of weeks. I am closing my doors for good and it feels good. I want to train dogs full time.

Tomorrow we will have more updates on training and progress.

Training with hubby

Weekends are going to be full of training with hubby for the next few weeks. Since my husband is somewhat leading training here (he's the diabetic) I have to use terms that he will use so I am changing a few commands listed for the benefit of others. My posts may be long at first while I get into a routine of documentation so I apologize but bear with me. Below is a list of commands and training exercizes we are using. Serious is having trouble figuring out if I am top dog or if my hubby is so I decided that while walking tonight I would follow hubby so that Serious could see that I am not top dog. It worked for the most part but Serious is a little stubborn. Ginger was very quick with this exercise. We will repeat the exercise tomorrow together.

Top dog or fall in (this has to be established with any dog) I do not use any negative reinforcements or punishment to do this. Simply, we start in a large but confined area for dogs that are not trained at all, and start walking. When the dog goes in front we turn around and go in the same direction. This is repeated until the dog falls in by our side. The reward is that we are happy that they are next to us and we can walk to a specific destination such as a door or home. We will repear this until he has it down solid. In the meantime, as he starts to understand this his response time to other commands will become much more promt and correct. When you do the training you can see how they think this is such a fun game and it is so neat to see them switch from playing mode to working mode.

Next we had to figure out how to get him to pick things up and bring them to us. You got to love retrievers. We tossed the meter back and forth a few times until he wanted to get it like it was another toy then my husband just threw it short and gave a command "meter" as Serious was picking it up and bringing it to him jsut like he would any other toy. It worked well.

We worked on "find low" some but Serious is so exhausted he has crashed. We started training really late in the day because there were other things going on but he did really good. More tomorrow.

We finally got Serious!

Serious came to live with us a week ago. He will have a very special job. My husband is a sever type 1 diabetic with a pump and glucose monitor but still has many serious low blood sugar levels. Serious job will be too tell us when my husband is going low so that he can get to a safe place and take care of himself.