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Frank Bruni

By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

This article is part of Times Opinion’s 2025 Giving Guide.

On her 25th birthday last February, Mara Shapiro, a graduate student pursuing a master’s in public health at the University of Virginia, got food poisoning. For her, that meant more than nausea and stomach pain. Because she has Addison’s disease, a rare autoimmune disorder, what might have been a minor medical episode became a full-blown crisis, and she ended up barely conscious, hallucinating and unable to move. Had her father not discovered her in that state on the bathroom floor, she might have died.

Afterward, she told me, “I became terrified to go to sleep at night, to travel by myself.” What if she had another medical emergency and no one was near?

That fear doesn’t tyrannize Shapiro anymore. She found a savior — with blonde hair, big eyes and four legs. His name is Rooster. He’s a roughly 2-year-old mix of Labrador retriever and golden retriever. And he has been trained to recognize sudden changes in her hormone levels or other signs of physical distress and to alert her, sometimes by pressing his nose against her thigh, in time for her to take the right medication or get help.

Rooster was with her, curled up under the podium, when she presented some of her work at an early November meeting of fellow public health researchers and scholars in Washington, D.C. He was the reason she could be there, feel safe there. He’s why she can attend a similar meeting in Florida early this month.

Although they’ve been together for less than two months, she said, “It’s hard imagining my life without him.”

Rooster is a graduate of

© The New York Times