Video of therapy dog caring for hospice patient goes viral
26 Aug 2015
A video of a 4-year-old golden retriever called JJ, a therapy dog caring for a hospice patient in Oregon has gone viral, reports King 5 News.
JJ, had been the primary therapy dog at Samaritan Evergreen Hospice House in Albany in Oregon state in the US,since she was a year old.
The video shows the certified therapy dog, with her head on a hospital bed as a patient's hand touched her face. A man not seen in the video reads the poem, ''What then?'' by W B Yeats, according to JJ's Facebook page. The video has been shared more than 200,000 times.
''This is a lady who has very few people to visit her. She cannot see and often does not wake up, but she did like having her hand on my fur,'' JJ's Facebook post says. ''We fell asleep later with her hand splayed on my head, but of us snoring (but not proof of that!).''
According to the Facebook page, a bed visit could vary but typically involved giving company to a patient, helping patients to be calm, or distracting a person to decrease discomfort while medications took effect. The video was originally posted in February 2014.
Over the past three years, she had worked 12-hour shifts with her ''boss lady,'' registered nurse Tracy Calhoun.
"What we do is absolutely touching, but the depth of the response to the video is amazing, as well as heart-warming," Calhoun told King 5 News.
JJ had participated in the Oso landslide and the SPU shooting relief measures.
Hopes that man's best friend could help doctors in detecting prostate cancer received a boost with research suggesting that trained German shepherd dogs could sniff out chemicals linked to the disease from urine samples with remarkable accuracy. (See: Research shows dogs can sniff out prostate cancer with over 90% accuracy).
