MILWAUKEE – Nothing against doctors, but it was a Siberian husky that first found Stephanie Herfel’s ovarian cancer and then detected two recurrences of the disease.
You can call it the ultimate in affordable health care. Stephanie feels like she’s living a miracle.
“I owe my life to that dog. She’s really been a godsend to me. She has never been wrong,” the Madison woman said.
The first time was 2013, a year after Herfel moved to Wisconsin from her native California. The husky, Sierra, was 9 months old when Stephanie received her in 2011 from her son in the Air Force who was leaving for overseas duty.
“She put her nose on my lower belly and sniffed so intently that I thought I spilled something on my clothes. She did it a second and then a third time. After the third time, Sierra went and hid. I mean hid,” Herfel said.
Herfel had been feeling pain in her abdomen. An emergency room doctor called it an ovarian cyst and sent her home with narcotic pain meds.
But Sierra made her own diagnosis, which she tried to communicate by freaking out and rolling up in a tight ball in the back of a closet.
“To see her become so afraid was spooky in its own right. So I made an appointment with a gynecologist and in a matter of weeks and some blood work with an ultrasound, on 11-11-13 I was sitting in the gynecology oncologist room in shock that I had cancer,” Herfel said.
It was stage 3C, a very serious diagnosis. She underwent a full hysterectomy and lost her spleen. Then chemotherapy was administered until April 2014.
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