As he raced over to his dog he heard an alarming gasping sound and realized it was Dyson, struggling for breath. In true spaniel form, the dog clenched the tennis ball in his teeth and wouldn’t give it up.
Nate hoisted him up and was surprised that he didn’t struggle as he usually did when he picked him up. He ran him to the bathtub and poured lukewarm water on him—not too cold, because he knew that could make this worse.
He took Dyson’s temperature: 108 degrees.
He tried to quash a sense of icy panic he felt rushing through him. This could not be happening. Not to his Dyson—the dog no one else in Friendly Dog class had put on their list. He had seen his potential and the dog had lived up to it beautifully. They had a bond from the first day. There was something about the way this dog looked at him, even then.
He called the veterinary emergency number at Fort Belvoir, where the Secret Service and local military working dog handlers take their dogs for most veterinary care. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, they wanted him to go there instead of an emergency clinic closer to his home. He’d have to contend with Maryland highways and go through Washington, D.C., before he got to the military installation in Fairfax, Virginia. If there was traffic, there was no telling how long it would take.
He lay Dyson in the van, on the flat surface where dogs hang out during work breaks, and blasted the air-conditioning.
This was an officer down. His partner. He turned on the siren and lights and drove as quickly as he safely could.
“It’s OK, buddy, you’re going to be OK,” he told him, looking in the rearview mirror and trying to choke back the tears as Dyson lay prostrate.
After a while, Dyson lifted his head. Nate kept talking to him.
It was a weekend, so the traffic was light. As they neared Fort Belvoir, Nate checked Dyson and saw with some relief that he was sitting up and gazing right back at him with his large, brown eyes.
Nate prayed the worst was over.
He whisked his dog straight back to the treatment room. As the veterinary staff was taking his temperature and starting him on IV fluids, Dyson kept spinning around to try to get to the thermometer. He snapped at the vet tech—something the normally friendly, gentle dog had never done. Nate knew this was a sign things were still very wrong inside of Dyson, that his dog was in survival mode.
Dyson had to be muzzled. It’s protocol at Belvoir to muzzle all military and other working dogs anyway, no matter how easy going. During prolonged stays they can be without muzzles as long as the staffers aren’t doing a procedure on them.
“Most of the Secret Service dogs we see, even the ERT dogs, are very, very friendly,” says Army captain Brianna S., DVM, who runs the Fort Belvoir Veterinary Center (VETCEN). “They’re really sweet and come up and want to be petted and really want their muzzles off. They’ll rub up against you like they’re saying, ‘Could you take this off, please?’”
Dyson made no attempt to take it off. He didn’t have it in him.
His temp was only 102 degrees, which is within normal range for dogs. Cooling him with the lukewarm water and the air-conditioning had worked. But Brianna knew that since Dyson’s temperature had been up to 108 degrees, he wasn’t out of the woods.
She was worried but tried not to show Nate. There had been a two-week marathon of canine heat injuries as temperatures began their midsummer climb. Just the day before, an Army dog was rushed in by his distraught handler. The dog had no pulse, and nothing they did brought him back to life.
Like the dog who didn’t make it, Dyson had heatstroke, the most serious category of heat injury. If it doesn’t kill, heatstroke can result in damage to the heart, kidneys, liver, nervous system, and gastrointestinal system. The complications don’t always manifest immediately.
The cooling Nate had done before leaving his house and en route probably saved Dyson from arriving DOA. One study showed that 61 percent of dogs with heatstroke died if not cooled before “presentation to a veterinarian.” “Only” 38 percent of dogs who were cooled by their owners had died.
Blood work showed Dyson’s coagulation times were prolonged, meaning he was taking too long to clot. A bad sign. His platelet count was low and getting lower with each check. Low platelet counts can lead to spontaneous internal hemorrhaging. He was already manifesting little purplish skin spots called petechiae, another signal that clotting is amiss.
Brianna was scared that Dyson was headed for something called disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC), an extremely dangerous condition where the body is both bleeding and clotting abnormally. DIC often leads to death. Brianna had a professor who once referred to DIC as shorthand for “death is coming” to impart the severity of the condition.
They immediately started a transfusion to try to prevent DIC.
Nate stayed with Dyson all night, sitting or lying down on the tile floor of the treatment room, right next to him. Because of his worry, and the staff’s hourly checks of Dyson’s temperature and vitals, Nate was awake most of the night. He got maybe a half hour of sleep and subsisted on a couple of small Snickers bars they scrounged up.
Dyson had a dog bed, but Nate was just in the shorts and the T-shirt he’d been wearing when he rushed out of the house. With the AC on in the kennel area, it was cold, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t leave his dog’s side until he knew he had rounded the bend.
Staff had removed Dyson’s muzzle after the initial exam, once he was calmer. They didn’t want anything to impede his breathing, and it was clear Dyson didn’t need it anymore.
Nate stroked Dyson’s head.
“You’re doing good, Dyson. You’re a good, good boy,” he told him.
He felt frightened and heartbroken as he looked at his dog, with all the tubes and wires coming out of him. How had Dyson ended up almost dying from chasing the ball three times in the yard? That kind of activity was nothing for Dyson, who could run from morning to night and barely be winded. It made no sense.
Brianna told him it was probably the increasingly hot weather in the last two weeks combined with the fact that Dyson wasn’t all that active that week and had spent more time than usual indoors. Maybe his body hadn’t yet acclimated to the heat.
On Sunday, Dyson was about the same. Nate called his wife and asked her to have some food ready so he could run home, take a shower, change his clothes, and bring back something to eat and something to sleep on.
He was gone for less than two hours. When he returned, Dyson lifted his head and wagged a few beats. It wasn’t his usual exuberant greeting, but his happiness registered on his heart monitor, which started beeping more rapidly as soon as Nate walked into the room.
Other than low but improving coagulation times, Dyson wasn’t doing too badly. His energy was down, but that was expected. Brianna told Nate that if he kept on this track, he might be able to go home Monday.
Nate settled in for another night beside his partner. “Just one more night here, buddy, and you’ll be home,” he told him while lying next to him face-to-face, smoothing the soft fur on Dyson’s ear. “Everybody misses you, Dyson.”
Dyson sighed, and his eyes closed. Nate kept his hand on Dyson for a long time after his dog fell asleep. He just wanted to feel him breathing, to feel him alive. Mostly he wanted Dyson to know he was right there, no matter what.
—
Back when he was traveling around the world as part of the elite Marine Helicopter Squadron One (HMX-1) in support of the president of the United States, Nate would often see the squadron’s canine teams and think how much fun it would be to work alongside a dog.
He didn’t think it would ever be his career. He loved his job. He’d enlisted in the Marines right out of high school and had gone through MP school in hopes it would look good on his résumé when he one day applied to be a New York state trooper.
HMX-1 came recruiting, and out of the 350 Marines going through
training at the time, they chose ten. Nate was nineteen years old the first time he wore dress blues and stood, armed, a foot away from President George W. Bush at Camp David. He saluted Bush, and Bush saluted him. It would be the beginning of an exciting, five-year Marine Corps career.
He and his crew would sometimes ride in the presidential helicopters to transport them relatively short distances when the president was not on board. (The helos, known as “white tops” because of their coloring scheme, are called Marine One only when the president is on board.) It was easier than dismantling them and transporting them by C-17 military cargo planes and then reassembling them at the destination.
A frequent route during Bush’s presidency was from the D.C. area to Waco, Texas. It was a long helicopter flight, with a few refueling stops—secure stops with fuel trucks that had to be checked and cleared on the ground for safety.
Nate’s main flying duty was in one of the Marine or Army support helicopters that accompany Marine One: CH-46 Sea Knights, CH-53E Super Stallions, UH-60 Black Hawks, or CH-47 Chinooks. Among the far-flung countries his job took him were Germany, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Guatemala, and Indonesia.
At the end of his five years (when the initial Marine Corps recruiter handed him his contract, which for some reason was for five years instead of four, Nate thought, Eh, what’s one more year?!), he had changed his mind about being a state trooper. His years based in Quantico had instilled a love of the area, and he enjoyed the idea that he was helping protect the president.
While in the Marines, he had come to admire and respect the work of the Secret Service. It was the only job he applied for toward the end of his time in the Marines.
He started his UD career in the Foreign Missions Branch and, after fourteen months, transferred to the Secret Service’s bike patrol (known in the Service as “Trek patrol”). He thought of it as a modern-day cavalry unit, with officers able to get to areas of concern more quickly than those on foot, and able to go where vehicles couldn’t. The physical aspect of the job appealed to the former high school soccer, lacrosse, and basketball team member.
In Secret Service bike training, the students learn how to ride down staircases on their police bikes. Nate challenged himself to ride up stairs as well and would practice occasionally on short sets of stairs.
Nate loved the job, the physicality, the outdoor nature of it. But almost three years into it, he saw an announcement for the new Friendly Dog program, and the dog lover in him jumped at the chance.
As exciting as HMX-1 duty had been, working with Dyson trumped it. Dyson was, of course, the best dog in the world. Nate loved everything about this dog: His cartoon character–like lightbulb moments when he sniffed an explosives odor during training. His wild enthusiasm for the work. His loving nature. His penchant for belly rubs. And those eyes . . .
—
Dyson didn’t take his eyes off Nate as his heart fluttered at three hundred beats per minute. Nate imagined how scared his dog must be, how weak and awful he must feel. Nate himself had been feeling this way since 3 A.M., when Dyson started experiencing dangerously rapid heart rates at random intervals. He couldn’t believe this was happening less than twelve hours from when he’d hoped to be able to bring him home.
They checked Dyson’s blood work. His white blood cell count and liver enzymes came back abnormal, and his platelets were starting to plummet. The minimum is around 200,000 per microliter, and Dyson’s crashed, down to 88,000, then 15,000, and eventually 9,000. Anything under 20,000 to 30,000 can lead to spontaneous internal hemorrhaging. Brianna thought Dyson was probably tiptoeing around the edge of this at best. His coagulation times were getting worse, too.
Nate tried to block the agonizing thought that Dyson could be dying right now because he threw the ball for him in his backyard. That he was responsible for the suffering his partner was going through.
His own chest felt tight and heavy. He tried not to show his worry, because Dyson would pick up on that. But Dyson knew him well, and Nate knew he couldn’t hide anything from his dog.
Brianna and the tech on duty had been administering a constant rate infusion of lidocaine intravenously to try to control Dyson’s heart rate, but had to give him an additional dose every time his heart went above 150 beats per minute. Dyson was suffering from ventricular tachycardia with ventricular premature complexes (VPCs). Lidocaine—the same agent used for numbing at the dentist—is the normal standard of care and first choice for VPCs. But it wasn’t working well on Dyson.
Brianna conferred with Major Jay C., one of Fort Belvoir’s clinical specialists and a boarded veterinary surgeon by trade. He suggested trying the drug procainamide, an alternative to lidocaine. It wasn’t the first drug they reached for because it can sometimes cause arrhythmias to worsen. But at this point it was worth a shot.
They didn’t have any in the clinic, so Brianna drove over to the base’s human hospital, Fort Belvoir Community Hospital, to try to get some. She left instructions with the tech to phone her if Dyson started to get even worse.
Dyson had needed so much round-the-clock care that Brianna had slept only two or three hours since his arrival. When she met with resistance from the hospital’s weekend staff, who didn’t understand that this person in civilian clothes was a veterinarian who desperately needed this medicine for a patient, it took everything she had to keep it together.
This dog’s life was at stake, and here she was, wasting precious time trying to convince them to give her the meds. Normally the hospital works seamlessly with veterinary staff. She knew it was just a glitch, and the people were nice enough, but it was a glitch that could end up costing a dog his life, a handler his best friend, and the president a hardworking protector.
About ninety minutes after Brianna first arrived, they gave her the procainamide. She raced back to the vet hospital.
To her disappointment, the new medicine seemed to wear off more quickly than the lidocaine, so after all that, she put Dyson back on his original medicine.
It had been hours since the tachycardia started, and Dyson was weakening. He couldn’t raise his head anymore, or didn’t bother.
Nate lay next to him, looking at him eye to eye. His goal was to try to keep Dyson’s heart rate from spiking, and to keep him calm when it did spike. There was nothing else he could do.
At one point, Dyson’s monitor showed a heart rate of 350. Dyson still did not take his deep brown eyes off Nate.
Nate stroked Dyson’s side, his head, and had a talk with him.
“Dyson, it’s OK if you have to go. It will be OK. Please don’t suffer any more for my sake,” he told him, trying not to lose it.
But when Dyson’s heart rate spiked again, Nate tried to coach him through it. He wanted his dog to want to fight it. After all, Dyson was only two, and they had so many great years ahead together.
“Come on, Dyson, you can make it through this one,” he said, listening for the monitor to drop back down. “It will be over soon; you’ll feel better.”
Dyson’s “normal” heart rate since all this started was 150 beats per minute, higher than it should be, but not dangerously so. When Dyson’s heart dropped back down to 150 after an episode, Nate could feel his own heart relax.
On Monday morning, with the regular staff back at the human hospital, Brianna went over and got a bunch of other supplies for Dyson. One of them was a lipid emulsion therapy, which acts as a toxin scavenger. She hoped it would help remove toxins that may have been contributing to his VPCs and tachycardia.
They administered it through a catheter into a vein. Within twenty minutes, his heart rate went down, he started having more normal beats, and the frequency of the VPCs decreased.
As the hours passed, Dyson’s heart rate during his episodes gradually decreased. Gone were the 350s, then the 300s. The highs became 250, then 200.
Brianna and another vet who had come in had thought ab
out putting a central line into Dyson to be able to administer multiple drugs and nutritional support more efficiently. It would also help Dyson because they could draw blood without having to poke him all the time. But they decided against it. It’s a relatively bloody procedure, and because Dyson’s platelet count was still far too low, there was concern about clotting issues.
Instead they opted to place a feeding tube in Dyson’s nose. He needed to get nutrition, and he wasn’t eating. He had already lost five pounds from his forty-five-pound frame.
Brianna wanted to stay with him to see him through. But the other vets and the techs insisted that, for her sake, she go home and get some rest after the marathon weekend. A vet sedated Dyson and wove the tube into his nose and down his esophagus to his stomach. Staff checked it with an X-ray to make sure the placement was right and started “feeding” him Ensure. He didn’t seem to mind.
Dyson’s blood work was improving. His platelets were still far too low, but they were moving in the right direction.
On Tuesday night, Nate felt for the first time like his dog was really going to make it. He had barely slept during the days and nights next to Dyson, but his fatigue was supplanted by cautious relief.
Dyson was now able to walk and would go outside to relieve himself. At first he moved lethargically. But by Tuesday night, with the feeding tube gone and eating on his own, he was strong enough to pull Nate outside.
On Wednesday, Dyson seemed almost like his old self again. He wagged when people came to see him, he rolled over to get a tummy rub, and while not as energetic as usual, he appeared to be well on the road to recovery. His platelets were at forty thousand and steadily improving, and his other blood work was back to normal.
Dyson was drinking in his usual funny manner as well. When he’s excited, he’ll dunk his head rapidly into the bowl. It looks like he’s trying to drink the water at the bottom of the bowl. Often when he’s done, he’ll turn quickly and fling water everywhere. He didn’t do his rousing finale at the vet’s, but they would have welcomed it. Anything he did that was part of his usual repertoire made them happy.
Secret Service Dogs Page 21
