A boxer mix who became a cancer-detection dog, a teacher for other service dogs, and eventually Keeva — partner to a teenager whose world had become dangerously small.
Caoimhe came to me as a 4-month-old boxer mix — DNA testing later revealed she was half Afghan, though you'd never guess it except for her long hind legs and a sighthound's soft mouth. She was born at the pound, adopted at three months, and landed with me after her first family hit financial trouble and posted her on Craigslist. I grabbed her up fast.
I chose Caoimhe to replace Brynda as the teacher dog in classes and for board-and-train dogs, and she excelled at it — until an ACL tear at around 18 months, from an encounter with a bigger dog, put her out of commission for nearly a year. Her training never really stopped, even injured, but the romping had to wait.
Alongside her teaching duties, I expected Caoimhe would eventually replace Micah as my own personal service dog, so she learned to alert to blood sugar levels too — and along the way, figured out how to spot an oncoming migraine and even how to alert to a sneezing fit, entirely on her own.
During her early training, I came across the Pine Street Foundation's program teaching people to train dogs to detect cancer. I went, and came home to teach Caoimhe to detect cancer, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's.
She taught me something back: that cancer is cancer, no matter where in the body it is or what species carries it. It all smells the same. Since that training, she's alerted to over 200 cancer samples from dogs and cats, and figured out on her own how to live-alert to humans with cancer too. Her success rate on samples runs at 92%.
When Caoimhe was 30 months old, a mother named Loretta reached out on behalf of her daughter Martina, who lives with Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) — a condition severe enough that ordinary smells like perfume, fresh-cut grass, or cleaning products could trigger anaphylaxis. Four months and two new alert scents later, I flew Caoimhe to Maine to meet Martina. She's been Keeva ever since, and it's been a mutual love affair from day one.
Martina's story went on to reach a wide audience — national news coverage described a teenager who'd gone from isolation and a windowless bedroom back to something like a normal life, with Keeva at her side reading the air for the things that could hurt her before she ever had to find out the hard way.