Saving Sadie Read online

  Mike Jacobs readily concurs. “It’s like that look on Sadie’s face almost says thank you,” he marvels.

  I lowered the volume, leaned back against my pillows, and pulled Sadie close, wrapping her in my arms. “You are a natural, Sadie, no doubt about it,” I said, stroking her head. “The camera loves you, and you are a star.” I was humbled to think how many thousands, probably tens of thousands, of viewers in southeast Wisconsin had seen Sadie’s story and been touched by what they had seen. “You are on the way,” I told her. “Pretty soon everybody will know your name.”

  Following Sadie’s appearance on Today’s TMJ4, we had another TV appearance a month later. In early February we were interviewed by Maximilian Hess, a student at Marquette University in Milwaukee, for a feature story on MUTV, Marquette University Television News. I didn’t mind that this story was only running on a student television station; it was great practice for Sadie and me to improve our interview skills while also spreading Sadie’s message to a new and untapped audience.

  Max, a bright, eager young man with clipped brown hair and glasses, came to the house to interview us, which gave him and his cameraman the chance to see Sadie in action and film it for the report: Sadie playing with her toys, going upstairs (with help), flying downstairs (with no help), playing peek-a-boo with a blanket thrown over her head, and frolicking in the thick layer of freshly fallen snow that blanketed the woods surrounding my house. I appreciated the deep interest that Max showed in Sadie and how much time he devoted to getting to know her and learning more about her life.

  When the feature was broadcast on February 20, the segment opened with a shot of Sadie sitting in the snow, paws folded regally beneath her as she gazed at the camera with an intense, serious expression on her face. This is Sadie, Max’s voiceover began. She’s not your usual dog. In fact, she’s everything but that. Her owner, Joal, lives in a quaint house in Muskego and has a true heart for animals. . .

  When the two-minute-nineteen-second segment finished, I sat back in awe, moved by the beauty of the piece and by how Sadie had been given the opportunity to shine on screen yet again. There’s so much bad news in the world, so many evil people, I thought. And at the same time, there are also so many worthy causes that deserve focus and attention. And yet people are willing to give airtime to Sadie, to share her story and help generate support. If not for Sadie, I would never have realized how truly kind and generous people can be.

  * * *

  In the midst of so many wonderful things happening, especially in terms of raising Sadie’s profile among the media, we faced some challenges and setbacks as well. At the end of January, I had to ask Marnette to cut back on her work with Saving Sadie in order to bring someone on board who was able to devote more hours to the tasks, especially Internet and social media-related tasks, that were becoming more and more complex and time-consuming.

  This was painful and difficult for both of us; Marnette had put her heart and soul into Saving Sadie right from the beginning. We never could have accomplished what we’d accomplished without her incredible effort and her valuable connections. But because she lived hundreds of miles away and had so many commitments in addition to Saving Sadie, I knew our needs would soon outdistance what she was able to provide.

  In truth, I worried about Marnette. She had a full-time job, did lots of pet sitting for friends, was mom to a houseful of cats of her own, and put in countless hours volunteering with pet rescue organizations in South Carolina. If there was a way to lighten her load when it came to Saving Sadie, I knew that was the right thing to do.

  Happily, my friend Dave Johnson put me in touch with Valerie Alba, a local woman who was running her own business as a virtual assistant. I went to interview Valerie and we clicked right away. I was impressed with her knowledge, skills, and enthusiasm, especially in the complex and quickly changing world of social media. I hired her immediately and since then Valerie has been in charge of managing Sadie’s social media presence, which includes her website, email newsletter, Facebook fan page, Twitter, Instagram, Pin-terest, and so much more. Today Valerie remains a vital member of Team Sadie, helping us stay in touch with friends and supporters around the world while disseminating Sadie’s message far and wide.

  * * *

  In the midst of everything else going on, Sadie’s therapy also continued in earnest as we pressed harder and harder, always fine-tuning her treatments and therapies, still searching for that elusive “magic answer” that would get her walking again. At the end of January, we began a new type of hydro treadmill therapy with Dr. Kristin Luginbill at Lakeshore Veterinary Specialists in Glendale, a suburb of Milwaukee. This was different from the hydro treadmill that Sadie used as part of her therapy at TOPS.

  For this hydro treadmill, visualize, if you will, a treadmill surrounded by a clear glass box. Dr. Luginbill, a tall, outgoing, warmhearted woman clad in hip waders with her long blond hair secured in a ponytail, climbs into the box and places Sadie on the treadmill, straddling Sadie between her legs and holding up Sadie’s back end. Once the box is closed and secured it slowly fills with water until the water covers Sadie’s legs and she’s able to take steps on the treadmill with her front paws while Dr. Luginbill moves Sadie’s back legs, trying to train her legs to move in an alternating rhythm, right-left, right-left, right-left, known as “patterning,” re-creating the pattern of steps that constitute a dog’s normal gait. While Dr. Luginbill and Sadie were in the glass pool, I would be standing outside the box in front of Sadie, encouraging her to keep taking steps.

  This therapy was intense and grueling for me, for Dr. Luginbill, and for Sadie, but we believed it offered Sadie the best opportunity to walk again, so we were committed to sticking with it, long term. “Whatever it takes, Sadie,” I would tell her after each of these exhausting sessions, as I dried her damp fur in a big fluffy towel and felt the fatigue radiating from her muscles. “This is the year that you will walk again.”

  * * *

  Developing a relationship with an animal, whether a dog, cat, horse, or other creature, is a lot like developing a relationship with a human being. The more time you spend together, the closer you become; the more you begin to understand the other’s thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams, and the more you can feel what each other is feeling. It is as if you share a single mind, heart, and soul, and can access the other’s thoughts and emotions, even learning to anticipate how the other will react in certain situations.

  Certainly Sadie and I had developed an especially close physical and emotional bond in the nine months since I had adopted her, and yet I still had many unanswered questions. I knew without a doubt that Sadie loved me; she showed me that every single day. My questions centered more around Sadie’s past, her memories, good and bad, and how she coped with processing the trauma she had endured. I so wished she could tell me about what had happened to her in those harsh Appalachian hills, even though I knew that hearing the whole story would undoubtedly break my heart.

  I often suspected that Sadie may have been shot by a man wearing a hat. Sadie loved everyone; to her every stranger was simply a friend she hadn’t met yet. The only time she ever reacted strangely and seemed upset was when she was around a man wearing a hat, especially a baseball cap. When she saw a man in a baseball cap, she would bark a fierce, angry, violent bark. This was my Sadie, a dog who never normally barked at all, so I knew she was reacting to something that I couldn’t see or understand.

  It’s okay, girl, don’t worry, I would console her, holding her close. Try not to think about that. The bad men are far away, and no one will ever hurt you again. I will protect you, I promise.

  I was highly intrigued by the possibility that maybe I could communicate with Sadie on a deeper level, and maybe there were people out there who could help initiate that process. In early February I got in touch with Keri Davis, a Canadian woman who practices what she calls Sacred Kinship, using her natural gifts as a medium to enable animals and their people to communicate more
directly with one another.

  I was especially taken by Keri’s philosophy, as described on her website: “Energetically we are all one, but in our evolution as rational, thinking Beings, we have narrowed our ability to communicate with humans only.” How true! Keri was committed to using her psychic gifts to reopen those channels of communication that had become closed off over time.

  I felt an additional kinship with Keri when I saw that her website was dedicated to her late dog, Mukluk, who was blind and deaf and whom she described as her “beloved dog, life partner, and teacher.” She wrote, “He taught me everything I DO & BE . . . I call him my little Wizard. Even though he couldn’t see or hear, he lived life full out, he taught me all about energy healing, deep listening, unconditional love, and never giving up!”

  Clearly, here was a woman who could understand and relate to my experiences and relationship with Sadie because she had lived something so very similar. I was excited to set up my first phone consultation with her, and when we finally spoke, I was amazed.

  Keri was able to “read” Sadie almost immediately, and conveyed to me that Sadie had a great deal of light surrounding her. Sadie believed in herself, and she certainly didn’t consider herself disabled. Sadie was living with a purpose, her own special purpose that drove her forward every day. Ultimately, Keri explained, Sadie’s journey was more about her changing me, forcing me to open my mind and my heart, than it was about me rehabbing her, or returning her to the state of physical wholeness that she’d existed in before she was shot.

  There was a very important message being conveyed here, embedded deep within Keri’s words, but I wasn’t quite hearing it, at least not yet. I was too focused on the surface of what she was saying, which was that Sadie was happy with the life she was living now.

  “But am I doing the right thing?” I asked Keri, my voice quavering as I clutched the phone tight. “Is this what Sadie really wants?”

  “Yes. Absolutely,” Keri replied with a confidence that surged across the phone line and settled deep in my soul. “Sadie wants to live. She didn’t want you to let her die. It wasn’t her time to go. She is happy with you every single day, Joal.”

  I don’t have words to explain what that meant to me, especially coming from an outsider, someone who had never met Sadie or seen her in person, yet who could still feel and touch and connect with her spirit on such a deep and powerful level.

  “Sustain Sadie, support her, and let her be who she needs to be,” Keri encouraged. “Where there is acceptance, true healing begins.”

  “Thank you. Thank you so much,” I whispered through my tears.

  * * *

  I was still on a high from my conversation with Keri when Dobie Maxwell contacted me again and arranged for Sadie and me to make another appearance on his radio show, The Mothership Connection, at the end of March, this time with Asia Voight. I was so excited that this was finally going to happen! Asia is a superstar in the field of animal communication, and her clients swear by her ability to help them connect with their pets, both the pets they have now and those that have passed on.

  The weather was terrible the night we were scheduled to be on Dobie’s show, near-whiteout conditions with sleet, snow, and freezing rain, so we decided to do the program from home, calling in to the studio, rather than risk the treacherous drive to Kenosha on icy highways. Asia, who lived in Fitchburg, just outside Madison, also chose to call in rather than risk the two-hour drive to Kenosha. I worried that Asia might not be able to get a strong reading from Sadie just over the phone, but I had enough faith to trust in her highly developed spiritual gifts, not to mention the trust I had in Sadie, trust that she’d be able to project her thoughts and feelings to Asia, even from a distance.

  It was just before eight o’clock on Sunday night when I settled onto the couch with a mug of hot chocolate, my fur babies surrounding me, and the phone clutched excitedly in my hand. Dobie introduced Asia first, and she described to Dobie and his listeners how she had had a near-death experience twenty-five years ago, when she was hit by a semi and trapped in her car, surrounded by flames and smoke. She had to jump out of the car to save herself but was severely burned and only given a three percent chance of survival. For three months afterward she hovered between life and death, and actually crossed over three times during that period. “Spiritual teachers were there to greet me and I heard them telepathically,” she described for Dobie and his listeners.

  This brush with death reawakened the dormant abilities Asia had had in her childhood that allowed her to communicate telepathically with people and with animals. “Everyone has the ability in their soul to communicate telepathically, with animals, with angels, with people who’ve passed,” she insisted.

  After a commercial break, Dobie brought me onto the program and introduced me to his audience. “Thanks for taking a ride on the Mothership,” his smooth baritone voice intoned. “This is Sunday night, I’m Dobie Maxwell, Mary Marshall is here, Greg Aguirre, and we’ve got Asia Voight, our special guest, on the phone. Joining us now is our friend, Joal Derse Dauer. Joal, are you there?”

  “I am, Dobie,” I replied.

  “Joal, do you want to tell Asia the story of Sadie in a nutshell?” he asked. “I know our listeners know it, but we have new listeners all the time. I just want to make sure because it’s such a fascinating story, and Asia’s gonna nail this, I know it, so go right ahead.”

  “Okay, Dobie, thanks.” After clearing my throat, I related a quick summary of Sadie’s backstory, about how she came into my life, the things she was doing now, and how we were working to get her walking again. I tried to keep it brief while making sure to hit the key points and especially highlight all the progress Sadie had made in the past nine months.

  “I think she’s adjusted to all this, but I really want to help her out,” I offered. “What do you see, Asia?”

  Asia paused, and I could hear her draw a breath before she replied in her sweet, almost childlike voice. “When you first started talking, I saw her come toward me, and actually I’m all teary-eyed over here because I just felt so much love from her, so much brilliance,” she began. “Because when I first started hearing your story about this, I just spontaneously felt this anger in my heart for these people doing this, and Sadie came forward and she just said, ‘No, no, don’t go there, Asia. Don’t be mad at those people, just remove that from your heart.’ ”

  I sat back on my sofa, speechless. That was exactly how I hoped, and imagined, Sadie might feel. She has such a generous spirit that it would be just like her to forgive the people who hurt and abused her.

  Asia went on to describe Sadie’s fighting spirit as she was perceiving it through Sadie. “Then she said, ‘Don’t say no to Sadie,’” Asia explained. “So what she’s really saying is, she’s so willing to do everything, don’t even try to say no to her. She’s not going to accept ‘no.’ That is one of the messages that she wants to spread to you, that there is nothing you can’t do. She just wants to wipe the word ‘no’ out of people’s minds when they feel limited, when they feel incapable, when they feel they’re not good enough. When they feel all those blocks and limits, then she’s like, ‘Nu uh, we’re going to do this, we’re going to move forward, and we’re going to do it with grace and joy and love.’”

  Suddenly I was very glad that we were on the radio and not on TV, because I didn’t want people to see my mouth drop open and my jaw fall to the floor. I was amazed that Asia was able to read Sadie so clearly, so strongly, from miles away and without even meeting her in person. But then it got even better.

  “Sadie also said that some people, when they see her, they feel sad for her and sometimes look at you like, why would you keep her alive? Why would you do this to this dog? She said that they are in the minority but that some people still say that, and she said, ‘I say to you that’s not true for us, I am so glad to be here. Every day I wake up and say what’s next, what can we do? What can we try?’ She said that everybody, whatever kind
of body they have, is in their greatest wholeness, whether you think it’s limited or not, that’s not the truth. It doesn’t have to be the truth, and so again she says there’s nothing to stop anyone; there’s no reason to be stopped in your life, and she will not hear of it.”

  By now my goose bumps had developed goose bumps, and chills danced up and down my spine, making my whole body tingle. This was a miracle—everything I hoped and dreamed about Sadie was true.

  “I feel that there are angels living in and around Sadie that have kept her alive, and that she really does embody angelic energy,” Asia added in her gentle, soothing voice.

  Mary Marshall, one of Dobie’s co-hosts on the show, chimed in. “Can Sadie give us any information as to who hurt her?” she asked.

  Asia paused, then spoke carefully. “When I first asked Sadie about these people who harmed her, she held her breath. She stopped breathing. She felt tense and started shaking her head no. She said she didn’t even want to go there, she didn’t want to talk about that, but she would be happy to show me images about where she used to live, what it was like, something from there.”

  I wasn’t at all surprised that Sadie didn’t want to think or communicate about the violence that nearly ended her life. Asia described how Sadie instead shared one of her favorite dreams, of a hilly place filled with pine trees, a place where she could run up and down those rocky hills, racing against the wind as she darted back and forth between the trees.

  Yes, I thought, that’s the life Sadie had, before this terrible thing happened to her. That’s the life I want to give back to her.

  As we continued our on-air conversation, I told Asia about Sadie’s treatments and how we were constantly changing it up and adding new things. For my final question I said to Asia, “I would just like to know what else Sadie is thinking. I mean she’s a happy girl, but do you have anything else, besides that she doesn’t want to revisit what happened to her?”

  “Yes,” Asia answered emphatically. “I do want to offer you some more.” She explained that she herself had been paralyzed after her accident and the doctors told her family that she would never walk again. They said that Asia would be ninety-eight percent disabled for the rest of her life.