Butters
So I've had a few people ask/talk to me about my Avatar and my signature, my sweet little Butters so I thought I would take a few moments to give everyone her back story.
In 2014, the doctors believe I had a mini-stroke. It happened when I was at work, I had to be air-lifted 90 miles north of me to get treated. Everything changed in that moment, though I wouldn't know for several week the true extent of what had changed.
I've actually had migraines almost my entire life, it started when I was 14, two or three a year to start. In my twenties, I would get two or three a year that would warrant a trip to the emergency room for a 'cocktail' to rescue me so I could recover. The rest, usually just a good hard sleep would take care of it. After the mini-stroke, though, they changed, for the worst. I would be down for days at a time, I was always in a brain fog and when you add that to the recovery of a stroke, it just wasn't good at all. I took my FMLA and spent the summer trying to get things under control, just a couple days shy of when I was due to go back, I was air-lifted again because I had stroke-like symptoms. My docs that time gave me a diagnosis, sort of. While I was having garden variety migraines, I was also experiencing hemiplegic migraines, a rare form of the disorder that mimics stroke symptoms. I was to stop working immediately, stop driving immediately and I needed to work on getting my disability.
Enter Butters. That winter, I went up to Kansas City for an extended visit and while I was gone, my fiancé heard that there was a litter of pups that was just born from a daughter of two service dogs. Butters' grandmother was actually a bomb and cadaver dog and was at Ground Zero a few days after 9/11 to help in rescue and recovery and her grandfather was a PTSD dog for veterans. He went to take a look at the litter, he told me later that of all the pups that were out there, as soon as he got close to the ground, Butters was the only one to approach him, snuggle into his arms, give him a kiss and fall asleep. I wouldn't meet her until February, but the pictures he sent of her, the second I saw her, I fell in love.
The first week I was home was one of the worst, not only did I bring home the flu, the migraines just kept coming and coming and I had to go to the emergency room four times for my rescue cocktail. But then, I started noticing that just before a migraine would hit, Butters would get up into my lap (this is not easy anymore, considering she's about 60 pounds of pure muscle), get eye to eye and nose to nose with me and just would not budge until I made her get down. Usually within an hour after that, I would have an attack and once I was in bed, she would snuggle in next to me and would not budge until I came out of it.
I started keeping notes, not just for my disability case or for my doctors, I kept them whenever Butters would start to get in my lap. Ninety-five percent of the time, my girl was letting me know I had a migraine coming, so I started working with her a little more. My fiancé has taken on just about every role of the household you can imagine, there are times when he goes to do the laundry that he's gone for a few days, so I started to train her on a few things. Once she signals to me that I have an attack coming, she walks with me through the house to shut it down, stays by my side while I wash up and get into my migraine recovery clothes, she's the first one on the bed, the last one to get snuggled in and she's the first one to get out of bed when my migraine is over. If I wake up and she doesn't move, I know I had best not move for a little while longer. It's only when I wake up and she jumps off of the bed that I know I'm over the worst of it and I can start moving around.
She is not formally trained to be a migraine alert dog, it just comes naturally to her and the training I've given her probably wouldn't be enough for me to get her registered as a migraine alert/service dog so I could take her with me in public. Truth be known, because of everyone claiming their pets are 'emotional support' animals when they do not have the proper documentation has probably made it even more difficult for me to get her properly certified right now, but I'm okay with it. Butters is exceptionally special in my eyes, my family's and my fiancé's, that's all that matters.
My girl is part Southern Louisiana Swamp Curr (Catahoula) and American Staffordshire Terrier, she's my little Creole sweetheart as I call her. The swamp dogs are the hog dogs, they're the ones that go after feral hogs and her specific line was bred so there is a lot more white on them than most catahoulas, too many hunters were accidentally killing their dogs when trying to kill the hogs because they couldn't tell hog from dog whenever they were mixed up and fighting. She just turned six years old this past Halloween and we named her Butters because she has this one spot on her back near her tail that reminds us of a butter bean. Aside from some freckles on her ears and the one patch of black and brindle on her eye, she's as white as snow.
When she's not dealing with me in migraine mode, she's plastered to the fiancé and follows him everywhere. She is as fast as the wind when she's in full sprint and absolutely loves to scare her son (we let her have one litter) when he's not paying attention, she actually sneaks up behind him and barks in his ear. Much to my chagrin, my girl does not like the sound of a lightsaber, does not matter if it's from the movies, from Family Guy, from my phone notifications, she will absolutely come unglued, barking, snarling and every hair on her back from her tail to between her ears in a three-inch wide swath stands straight up. So sadly, no more Star Wars movies played in this house and I had to change my notification sound. She also loves to watch the news with me, I think she likes David Muir's voice and she loves watching public television with us. She's absolutely a Frisbee girl and will run herself until she's just flat exhausted if we let her, but if we're all outside and she knows I'm about to have an attack, she will run to me, stop, sit next to me, softly whines and puts her paw on my foot. After that, she's all business and will stay that way until I'm clear of the migraine.
She's my girl and I love her so, so much. I wouldn't know what I would do without her.