(WASHINGTON POST) — It was the middle of the night. The lights were off, the house was still, the six members of the Nuttall family were sound asleep. The machinery that monitors the blood sugar levels of 7-year-old Luke Nuttall, who suffers from dangerous type 1 diabetes, was utterly quiet.
But Jedi, Luke’s diabetes-sniffing dog, was not.
The black lab jumped on and off of the bed Luke shared with his parents, thumping onto the mattress in an attempt wake the slumbering adults. When that didn’t work, he lay on top of Dorrie Nuttall, startling her out of sleep.
She clambered out of bed and examined her son’s continuous glucose monitor, but its reading was normal. Still, the dog was unrelenting. He bowed again and again, repeating the signal he’d been trained to send if he sense that Luke’s blood sugar had gotten too low.
