Chloe’s Journey With CDK
By: Bailey Corley
Canines for Disabled Kids (CDK) helped change Chloe’s life for the better. Thanks to CDK, she was able to get Chick and the pair finished training together. Before Chick, Chloe was in a wheelchair. It wasn’t for mobility reasons, though. Chloe could walk fine, but she used to have seizures frequently. Her seizures came from a brain injury she had when she was 11 years old. The seizures weren’t epileptic and she wasn’t able to tell when they were coming. So she would just fall to the ground and risk further injury and head trauma. She had no choice but to be in a wheelchair.
Prior to her seizures, Chloe was all about athletics. She always did sports. She used to play tackle football for eight years. Her dad is a sports coach and her brother plays sports, so they are a very sports-oriented family.
Chloe started the process of getting a service dog by filling out applications to try to get some financial assistance from Canines for Disabled Kids (CDK). She first found out about CDK through people she knew at a local organization where they trained service dogs. A lot of their clients had gotten scholarships through CDK. When she applied, CDK gave Chloe a form to fill out for some grant money to help her get her service dog trained.
Chloe got Chick in 2018 when he was 18 months old. Chloe was 12 and he was already almost fully trained to be a seizure alert and response dog when the pair matched. They finished training together. The training program also employed inmates from a corrections facility through a program called ABLE, which stands for “at both ends of the leash.” This program changes the inmates’ lives and the lives of the individuals receiving the dogs.
As a result of her head injury, Chloe had lost all of her independence. According to Chloe, “I lost the ability to do anything I liked. I was in a wheelchair and I couldn’t go to school. I was having two to three seizures a day. But after I had gotten Chick, he tells me about an hour before I have a seizure. So I could get safe and not have to be in a wheelchair, because I won’t just fall.” Chick has never missed an alert. Another awesome thing about Chick is that he applies pressure therapy and lies on Chloe’s abdomen when she has seizures. That helps her get out of them sooner.
A key to Chloe’s seizures is that the shorter they are, the easier it is for her to recover from them. When Chick lies on her abdomen, she breaks out of her seizures 30 seconds later. But before they could last anywhere from 15 seconds to two hours. The shorter the seizure, the easier it is to recover, because having a seizure takes a lot of energy out of you. So minimizing seizures is the best way to go.
Chloe said, “I’ve been able to get my independence back and my parents haven’t had to be around me 24/7. I’ve been able to go back to doing plays and things that I like to do. And I’ve also been able to just be a normal kid, like everyone else.”
