Diagnosed with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia “POTS” at age 16 Sage’s diagnosis was just the beginning of an unpredictable roller coaster ride of fear and the unexpected
Sage Chador was devastated. She’d been paired with a service dog to help her cope with POTS, a rare condition that raises her heart rate by about 30 beats per minute—or more—within ten minutes of standing. She fell in love with the dog, but he had aggression issues, and after six weeks, she had to give him up. Sage had taken training classes through Hearts of Gold, and the team suggested she meet a new dog, Brutus, a Labrador Retriever-Great Pyrenees’s mix.
“I was skeptical, but they took me to the mall one day to see how he would respond if I passed out,” says Sage, a student at the University of Nevada, Reno. “So I pretended to fall and he stood over me and started licking my face. I was almost crying because he wasn’t initially trained for that. That’s when I thought, ‘This is going to be OK.’”
“Brutus was trying to tell me something about my heart rate and I wasn’t listening.”
Sage was diagnosed with POTS at age 16. “It came out of the blue,” she says. “I had a fever and suddenly I couldn’t stand up.” Medications help to manage the condition, but it doesn’t eliminate all of the symptoms or occasional flare-ups. “It’s like you’re running a marathon all the time, because your body reacts like you’re in shock,” she says. “It can be exhausting.”
Brutus is trained to help Sage if she passes out. He can pick up objects for her and turn on the lights in her room, and he also accompanies her to classes.
“He barked at me in the middle of class.”
“When I went back to school I was pretty scared,” says Sage, now 21. “It was good having that security—knowing I was never alone if anything happened. I was super nervous in one of my classes and my heart rate was racing. Brutus kept sticking his nose on me and I was ignoring him. Eventually, he barked at me in the middle of class. He was trying to tell me something about my heart rate and I wasn’t listening.”
Sage and Brutus have been together for a little over a year and a half, and the bond is intense. She’s found Brutus to be both stubborn and playful: Recently he tried telling her that he wanted to go for a walk by turning the light switch on and off.
“He’s a goof,” she says with affection. “I don’t go anywhere without him.
Follow Hearts of Gold on Facebook: HeartsofGoldWV.
Ken Budd’s writing credits include The New York Times, National Geographic, Smithsonian, CityLab, The Washington Post, AARP The Magazine and many more. He writes the “Everyday Heroes” column for The Saturday Evening Post and he’s the author of the award-winning memoir The Voluntourist. Ken’s work has won gold awards from the Society of American Travel Writers and the North American Travel Journalists Association. He has appeared on programs such as NBC’s Today, The CBS Early Show, and CBS This Morning, and he’s the host of 650,000 Hours, a new digital series that will debut in 2019. You can follow Ken on Twitter and Facebook.
Hearts of Gold raises, trains, and places dogs to assist people with disabilities. Based in Morgantown, West Virginia, the nonprofit organization provides the dogs with two years of training and conducts research to determine the most efficient training methods. Hearts of Gold partners with some of the top universities that use therapy dogs, including West Virginia University, Emory University, the University of California-Berkley, and Columbia University.