“It was very scary,” recalls Nancy. “I never thought I would get cancer. I always thought everybody else got cancer, and I lived a pretty healthy lifestyle. It was a shock.”
“The diagnosis was, unfortunately, a new breast cancer called ductal cancer,” says Dr. Phelps. “It’s one that can be extremely dangerous, that spreads quickly, and the timing is critical. Gotten early, these are the cancers you can cure, but just a little too late and they spread.”
“When the doctor called me with the results,” says Nancy, “the first thing that I thought was, I was going to lose my family, my children. I wouldn’t get to see them grow. Other than the fact that you think you’re going to die, you have to think about the things you haven’t done yet. And you know tomorrow is not promised to anyone. I had that feeling in an instant.”
Nancy was immediately scheduled for a partial mastectomy and the removal of nearby lymph nodes where the cancer might have spread.
“My fear was for any suffering Nancy might have to endure,” says Jeff. “I gave her a kiss for good luck, and I was just trying to keep her positive. But, you know, there’s always that thought in the back of your mind that you can’t help but think: Your wife is going to die.”
As Jeff waited, the surgeons removed twenty-six lymph nodes from below Nancy’s arm.
“All of the lymph nodes were negative for any spread. The cancer was confined just to the small area,” says Dr. Phelps. “She was able to remove the cancer and preserve her breasts, and go through the treatment with a very high likelihood of complete cure.”
“If this cancer hadn’t been detected at that time, my doctor feels that it could have gotten a lot worse. He said the chance of it spreading would’ve increased,” reveals Nancy. “Had Mia not discovered it at that time, my chances for survival would have been greatly reduced.”
“The fact that the dog was able to do this is just remarkable,” says Dr. Phelps. “I’ve heard little bits and hints. You hear them from cancer specialists now and again ’cause they’ll hear the stories. But I never thought I would see a case like that. Who would ever think?”
“I think the miracle here,” says Jeff, “was that Mia was determined to let Nancy know that there was something going on there that wasn’t right, and she kept at it until Nancy realized it.”
To show Mia how much they appreciate the miracle she gave them, Nancy and Jeff reward her each morning with a special treat.
“My husband makes breakfast for the kids in the morning, and Mia waits anxiously every day for her pancake,” says Nancy. “And she’s just thrilled to be spoiled like that. She’s the little princess of the house now.”
And Jeff realizes how close he came to not allowing her to be part of their family.
“I thought about the fact that I never wanted the dog to begin with, and what an amazing thing it was that we got her,” Jeff remarks. “I mean, I didn’t want it, and Nancy kind of snuck down there and bought this dog behind my back, and then it turns out to be a savior dog, you know. So it was a tremendous thing.”
“For Mia to find this cancer, and just five months after I had a negative breast exam, is a miracle. It’s nothing less than a miracle to me,” declares Nancy. “If Mia could understand words, I would tell her thank you. Thank you for alerting me to something that could have taken my life, something that could have taken me away from my children, my husband, the things I love most.
“I would tell her that she is my miracle, and there is a reason that I have her, and that I love her.”
1999 was a bad year for Rob Gingery of Memphis, Tennessee. Recently divorced, and separated from his son, Rob channeled his depression into motorcycles and living on the edge.
“He was at the point in his life where he didn’t care anymore. He’d party all the time, and then he’d want to know where the next party was,” remembers his girlfriend Cale Smith. “He was always cutting up on his motorcycle—the faster, the better.”
And then one afternoon in May, Rob and Cale were leaving a restaurant along with Rob’s close friend, Randy Brewer.
“Rob and I were going to ride our bikes over to his house. Cale was riding with another friend of ours in their car,” explains Randy.
After the couple said their good-byes, Randy and Rob sped out of the parking lot. As they headed back to Rob’s house, the two friends played a dangerous cat-and-mouse game, each trying to outrace the other at speeds of up to a hundred miles per hour.
Randy recalls, “We were hot-rodding back and forth, you know, on the main streets. When we got in the neighborhood, we turned the corner and Rob just shot off. I wasn’t really familiar with all the streets, so I drove at kind of a slower pace.”
Meanwhile, Cale and her friend Kat had taken a different route to Rob’s house.
“We went kind of the back road, and as we got there I noticed that his motorcycle wasn’t there. I looked at Kat and I said, ‘He’s down.’ She told me not to jump to conclusions, but I knew he was down, I could feel it.”
The two women sped off in search of Rob and Randy to make sure they were all right, but they didn’t have to travel far to discover that Cale’s horrible premonition had come true.
“When we turned the corner, there he was. The motorcycle was flipped upside down, and pipes were sticking out. It was a mess. Rob was lying on the curb with blood all over him.”
“Cale was hysterical,” remembers Randy. “She was crying, hanging over him, trying to see if he was alive.”
“The paramedics came at about the same time, and they jumped out and pulled me away from him,” says Cale. “We didn’t know if he had a broken neck—we didn’t know anything. When the paramedics finally got him on the gurney, Rob kept saying, ‘Where’s Cale? Where’s Cale?’ He looked at me and gestured for me to give him a kiss, so I leaned down and gave him one, and then he shut his eyes. I thought he’d died. I really thought that was it.”
Rob was still alive, but badly injured. The paramedics rushed him to the Regional Medical Center in Memphis. His injuries were extensive, including four skull fractures, a broken hand, and a broken leg. But it was his behavior that had Dr. Preston Miller most concerned.
“It’s pretty typical for folks who have a significant head injury to be combative or confused or a little bit out of it,” Dr. Miller explains, “so he went from our shock trauma room to the CAT-scan room, where he had a CAT scan of his brain.”
The CAT scan revealed that Rob had received a traumatic head injury. A small blood clot had formed in his brain.
“Those sometimes stay the same and sometimes get worse,” says Dr. Miller. “There’s no way of knowing. If they stay the same, it’s great, but if they enlarge, it either leads to serious brain damage or death.”
Cale was there when they did another CAT scan early the next day. “By about 7:00 in the morning, the blood clot had tripled in size. So the doctors rushed in and started telling us that they needed to do emergency surgery.”
Rob was rushed to an operating room where neurosurgeons spent the next several hours opening his skull and removing the blood clot from his brain. When they finished, there was nothing left to do but wait and pray that Rob would regain consciousness.
Meanwhile, Cale struggled to deal with the grim possibilities. “The doctors came out and said he could be a vegetable. I thought about what I would do if he did die. I cried more than anybody knew. Not only was I going to lose