Woman, 31, gets life-threatening diagnosis one day after she noticed her dog acting bizarrely around her
The woman says her dog started acting 'antsy' around her
Niamh Shackleton
A woman got a shocking diagnosis shortly after her dog started acting strangely around her.
Kenzie Kinney Seymour has a two-year-old rescue dog called Sunny and her four-legged friend started all of a sudden acting 'antsy' around her.
One particular thing she was fixated on was Kenzie's neck, said the 31-year-old.
"She could sense something was wrong," she told Newsweek. "She wouldn’t stop whining, licking excessively, hovering and laying behind me, propping herself on my back, neck and shoulders."
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Kenzie shared a now-viral clip to Instagram showing Sunny's unusual behavior. The pooch was seen sat behind her mom and had her head rested on Kenzie's shoulder.
She wrote across the video: "The day before I was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm, my dog kept climbing behind me and wouldn't leave my neck alone."
Apparently Sunny has a history of predicting her owner's health woes.
"She does the same thing with my leg that has permanent chronic blood clot damage," Kenzie explained. "It is always nerve-wracking when Sunny gets so antsy like that, because it’s not normal for her and I know she is sensitive to my health problems."
A brain aneurysm is a bulge or ballooning in a blood vessel in the brain, explains Mayo Clinic.
It goes on to say: "Experts think brain aneurysms form and grow because blood flowing through the blood vessel puts pressure on a weak area of the vessel wall.
"This can increase the size of the brain aneurysm. If the brain aneurysm leaks or ruptures, it causes bleeding in the brain, known as a hemorrhagic stroke."
People have replied to Kenzie's video sharing their own experiences of their pets alerting them to something being wrong.
"I had a similar experience recently with a non-trained dog alerting to me," somebody penned. "She was able to predict an episode of syncope before I even felt it and potentially saved me from what could have been hours of coming in and out of consciousness."
"Dogs are so so cool," they added.
A second said: "I swear my mother’s dog could smell my brain tumor growing and didn’t want to die because she knew I was sick. Dogs are beautiful."
And these people aren't just imagining things; dogs can actually smell a change in their owners that could alert them to a potential health problem.
For example a study found that dogs are able to detect COVID-19 in humans. Of the six detection dogs studied, they had a 94 percent success rate of sniffing out the virus, PetMD reported.