Meet the Dog Who Saw Him Through Recovery from a Brain Hemorrhage

Spencer Pickell: I’m Spencer Pickell. I’ve been living in Bellingham for about nine years now. And I think it was in 2013, I was visiting my brother and I got a crazy headache, so we went to the hospital, and they did an MRI and a CT scan and they found what’s called a cavernous malformation. And then, four years later, it ruptured and it just was really crazy.

I was up in Canada at the time, with my ex-girlfriend. I woke up in the hospital about a month and a week later. And I had no recollection of it. I thought I crashed on my mountain bike. So, yeah, it was pretty crazy experience.

I didn’t really realize it, but my memory was just so bad that people would tell me something, I’d forget it like five minutes later. But I think the hardest part about the recovery process is each day seems like its own entity. So, when I go to sleep at night and wake up the next morning, each day is like its own universe. It’s really hard for me to connect the previous days to the current days. And that’s gotten better over time, but that, I think, has been the biggest struggle.

Moon is my emotional support dog. She is mostly a boxer, but we’re thinking maybe some bulldog or something like that; she’s a mutt. She was a rescue dog. She was abandoned. She was a Mexican breeder dog before we got her. So, I was living in San Diego at the time. So she was abandoned right across the boarder, so we picked her up and yeah, she’s just super awesome.

The way that Moon helps me is, she just gives me somebody who’s always there for me. If I’m having a bad day or anything like that, I can come home and I know Moon’s gonna be there with smile on her face, wagging her little, stumpy tail, and all that sort of stuff. And it’s just nice for me to get out on walks and stuff like that with her, and take her biking. It’s just great to have that companionship, I think. Not so much, human being companion, but I don’t know, there’s something special about a dog, dog and human relationship. It’s really awesome.

Basically, my takeaway from this entire thing is, just listen to your doctors and have a lot of faith in them. Because without the doctors, I definitely would not be here right now. And not just one doctor, but multiple doctors. And family is also super important too. So listen to your doctors and love your family.