Woman Rescues Hospice Dog With ‘Weeks to Live’—Unprepared for What Happens

A rescue dog who was given a matter of weeks to live is about to celebrate five years with the woman who took him in.

In March 2019, when Chandler Perry from Washington D.C. first laid eyes on Ben, who is a Labrador and Rhodesian ridgeback mix, he was a shell of the dog he is today.

“When I first saw him, my first thought was, ‘This dog looks kind of weird,’ as he was 30 pounds underweight because he wasn’t eating while at the vet,” Perry told Newsweek. “He had a really tall and lanky body with a really big head.”

Perry had answered an email from a local Labrador rescue center calling for someone to foster Ben and provide him with a final forever home. When she took him home, Perry was told the canine had three weeks to live.

Ben had a mass on his spleen, which vets said would keep growing without surgery. Unfortunately, the dog wasn’t considered healthy enough for them to risk the procedure to remove it.

Perry decided to provide Ben with the home he needed to die with dignity in. It was a decision motivated in part by the recent loss of her beloved Labrador, Killa.

“I was heartbroken and felt like I needed to wean off having a dog,” Perry said. “In hindsight, knowingly fostering a dying dog was likely a horrible idea. I signed up for an email list for a Lab rescue because I have always had Labs.”

By the time Perry took him home, Ben had been living at the veterinarians for two months. The Labrador came with 58 pages of vet records, detailing instances of unexplained blood transfusions, hypothermia and heatstroke in the time prior to joining her.

The journey back home with Ben wasn’t an easy one. “He obnoxiously barked for the first hour on the way home and finally went to sleep in the car,” Perry said. “But, as soon as we turned onto my court, he went CRAZY.”

Sometimes, a change of scenery and a shift in focus can bring about a noticeable positive change in a shelter dog. A 2018 study in Applied Animal Behavior Science estimated that just 15 minutes of one-on-one petting was enough to boost the well-being of the average shelter dog.

From the moment Ben arrived at Perry’s house, it was like a weight had been lifted.

“He was like a different dog,” she said. “He went from this meek, then obnoxiously loud, dog, to one that couldn’t stop sprinting around.”

To Perry’s way of thinking, “it was like he knew he was home” and could barely contain his delight at being away from the shelter. “He got inside and started sprinting up and down the stairs, skipping three steps at a time,” she said.

Perry added that it was smooth sailing from there. In fact, it seemed almost a little too smooth for a hospice dog. “I couldn’t get over that he was on all of this medication because he truly seemed fine like he was a regular dog,” Perry said. “He’d run around my backyard and play outside by himself for hours. His appetite was great, despite starving himself at the vet and in the shelter.”

Soon enough, Ben was gaining weight and, after a checkup with his vet, it was determined that he was now eligible for the surgery needed to remove his spleen. “I was so excited,” she said. “I still remember exactly what I was doing. I was at Texas Roadhouse with my dad when I got the news.”

This development was a little bittersweet, though. Once he recovered, it was likely that Ben would likely be adopted permanently by someone else as Perry was unable to take him on at the time.

“I was based in DC at the time and was due to matriculate to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] in the fall in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had a lease where dogs weren’t allowed,” Perry said. “Since he wasn’t supposed to live, it was a non-issue at the time I decided to foster him.”

Thankfully, during their time together, Perry’s dad had also become rather attached to Ben. With little time to waste, he stepped in to adopt the hospice dog turned rescue pet. Perry was reunited with Ben upon her return from MIT a year later.

The pair have been inseparable ever since, with Perry describing Ben as the most intelligent and loving dog she has ever met. “I can’t say no to him. Even all of his dog sitters are obsessed with him. I used to be a consultant, and the joke was that he was their child as well. He’s such a special, low-maintenance dog with a big heart.”

Ben is an avid walker who will look at you crazy if you try to give him a toy. Perry said that the pet gets really excited around other dogs to the point where he gets anxious, which might explain why he struggled in shelters and rescues before.

“I truly think it’s because he just needed some love and some better living conditions,” Perry said. “The anxiety was getting to him.”

Perry shared Ben’s story in the hope that it might inspire others to help dogs like him in need of love.

“A little kindness can go such a long way and change someone else’s life in ways that we can’t even fathom,” Perry said.

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