Dog Owner Discovers Their Pup's Annoying Nighttime Habit Has Actually Been Saving Their Life
Man's best friend indeed!
Soloviova Liudmyla | Shutterstock Dogs may be cuddly little goofballs, but it's easy to forget they are also highly attuned instinct machines. All that sniffing they do is compiling clue after clue about their environment, and if you've ever had a dog, you know they tend to understand your every move and emotional contour, just from having watched you.
But for one dog owner on Reddit, that expert canine instinct became an actual lifesaver. Like many dogs before her, it turns out she has actual medical qualifications that have come in really handy in diagnosing her owner's condition.
The owner was becoming annoyed with their dog's nighttime licking.
New Africa | Shutterstock
Though they're nowhere near as bad as cats, with their 3 a.m. jumping sprees, there's nothing quite as annoying when it comes to dog ownership than inconveniently timed zoomies. And this owner had about had it with their shih tzu Maltese mix's nighttime playfulness.
"For the last few weeks I was waking up feeling unrested," they wrote. Why? Because every night around 2 a.m., their dog would wake them up by licking their face. "I was wondering why doesn’t she just sleep instead of being playful so late!," they wrote.
After enough encounters, they decided an investigation was in order and set up a camera in the bedroom to capture old Fido in the act of whatever the heck she was up to in the middle of the night. Turns out, it wasn't playing at all.
The dog was waking her owner up because their breathing kept stopping during sleep.
When they reviewed the footage from their camera, they got a rather sobering answer. "I was stopping breathing in my sleep and she somehow noticed each time," they wrote. Time and time again, they saw their dog "rushing to try and wake me up so I can breathe again."
Yep, sounds like good old sleep apnea, a sleep disorder in which a person briefly stops breathing while sleeping. It comes in two varieties: Obstructive sleep apnea, when the upper airway becomes blocked by the tongue or soft palate, or central sleep apnea, a neurological condition in which the brain fails to properly signal breathing.
In either case, the person ends up gasping for air or choking in their sleep, which leads to poor sleep quality, fatigue, and, over time, a higher risk for conditions like heart disease. It seems this person's pupper was hearing the gasping and locking into action.
"As soon as my snoring stopped and I went silent….she got up from her bed and profusely began licking me," the owner wrote. Shihtzu Maltese to the rescue!
Dogs are so good at detecting illness that they are sometimes used in medical settings.
I once dated a guy whose dog developed a brief obsession with his stomach, constantly sniffing around his abdomen, pawing, and whining. He thought nothing of it until one day he had a bracing pain in his gut and, several tests later, found out what the dog already knew: It was stomach cancer, thankfully caught early enough to be treatable.
Studies have shown that dogs can quite literally smell cancer in several different forms. In one study, German shepherds were found to have a 90% detection accuracy rate, far and away better than the actual medical test typically used in diagnosis.
They can also sniff out migraines and seizures, detect Parkinson's disease much earlier than symptoms often appear, and can be expert monitors for diabetics, as they can smell significant changes in blood sugar before humans can. They've even been found to be able to smell malaria in people's socks, of all things.
As for the Redditor, people, of course, gave them the standard advice: to get a C-PAP machine, a medical device that helps ensure people with sleep apnea breathe normally through the night. But some commenters didn't quite understand the need, since "they already have a CPUP." Good girl, indeed.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
