THE ANGEL BY MY SIDE Book Description
It was 1994, and Mike Lingenfelter expected his life to end soon. Two serious heart attacks and open-heart surgery had stripped away most of the pleasure he had in his life. His doctors still held out hope for him, however. Their vision was that an energetic dog on a leash might motivate Mike to get out of the house and exercise. And so it was that a golden retriever named Dakota, who had been rescued from death himself, came to live with Mike and help him and his rehabilitative therapy. Dakota became Mike’s protector and his best friend, saving Mike’s life many times after somehow learning how to forewarn him of oncoming heart crises. Dakota gave Mike back his dignity, his pride, and his life.
Eventually became clear to Mike that Dakota was a spirit guide, and it was Mike’s duty to share him and the power of the human-animal bond with the world. So, as these two special individuals journeyed through their life together, they often paused along the way to touch others. Dakota continually helped make miracles happen – but ultimately, as part of that journey, one more miracle was needed, as Dakota fought a courageous and dignified battle for his own life.
About the Authors
 Mike Lingenfelter is an accomplished engineer, and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He holds 17 patents for his work worldwide. Mike and his wife, Nancy, who are the parents of four children and seven grandchildren, reside in Huntsville, Alabama.
David Frei is the co-host of USA Network’s annual telecast of the popular Westminster Kennel Club dog show. He lives in New York City, with his wife, Cherilyn, and is the Director of Media Relations for the American Kennel Club.
Here is an excerpt from The Angel By My Side.
Reviews
"The partnership between Mike and Dakota was astonishing, humbling, beyond description—and absolutely true. This remarkable story about a man and a dog has volumes to teach us about healing, devotion, and the mysterious and numinous bond of one soul to another: Must-reading for anyone who has ever loved—or been loved—by a dog. For skeptics of the human-animal bond, this book will make you a convert!"
- Susan Chernak McElroy, author of Animals as Teachers and Healers
"The Angel by My Side magnificently showcases how, over the millennia, we’ve come to find our relationship with pets inextricably woven into not just our health and happiness, but our very survival. Nobody who reads this book will ever look at their own pets the same way again—they’re not pets, they’re life-support systems cleverly disguised as four-legged family members! Do your pet and yourself a favor: Buy this book, and when you’re done reading it, keep it in the medicine cabinet for the next time you need salve for your soul."
- Marty Becker, D.V.M., veterinary contributor for Good Morning America, chief veterinary correspondent for Amazon.com, and author of The Healing Power of Pets
"Get yourself a comfortable chair and a box of tissues, and curl up with this book. As you read this remarkable story, you will come to believe in the human-animal bond, if you didn’t already."
- Sophie Engelhard Craighead, Chairperson of the Board, Delta Society
"With this book, Lingenfelter and Frei have done a tremendous credit to the service dog community. The writing style is spare, as there is no need for fanciful phrasing and flowery speeches. Their message is clear and concise and so is their writing."
- Shaun Coen, Dog News Magazine
Lingenfelter says he was compelled to record the miracle of his experience with Cody to lend hope and inspiration to others. In so doing, their story will have you on an emotional roller coaster. At the conclusion, you’ll not know whether to stand up and cheer or sit down and cry, and likely you’ll do both. But The ANGEL by My Side is much more than a feel-good, tear-jerking diary. It will endure as a classic testament to the precious and tender spirituality of the canine/human bond.
- Rue Chagoll, Golden Retriever News
Book Excerpt
Chapter One: Mad at the World
"No way. I already have a dog."
My psychiatrist, Dr. Attar, was accustomed to hearing me protest anything and everything that she suggested. This was no different. I didn't need a dog — I knew the end was coming for me, and I wanted it to. I'd had enough of life like this, and my angry, macho attitude helped me deal with the inevitable. I had to face it: I was helpless, at the mercy of my weakened heart. I couldn't do anything without medication or doctors' approvals. I couldn't lift anything heavy; I couldn't drive alone. And the doctors had told me that I wasn't going to get better — I was only going to get worse.
And now they wanted me to get a dog? Great.
***
What happened to me? It was only two years ago that I had the world by the tail. I had a wonderful marriage and a beautiful, loving family. I was living the good life in picturesque, sunny southern California. I had every engineer's dream job, which was challenging and rewarding and made me all the money I could ever need.
My specialty was designing and managing construction of communications and control systems for airports and public transportation. I'd been working on the Los Angeles Metro Rail Red Line, a state-of-the-art mass transit project. It was a pressure-packed project (as most of them were), with demanding deadlines and billion-dollar budgets. I was good at my job, but I was also very driven and intense — a true type-A personality thriving under the demands of my profession.
I couldn't work hard enough. I put in long days on location, and spent countless hours working at home on evenings and weekends. Occasionally I could make myself step away from it, but most of the time my job was my life. So it wasn't a shock when I had a major heart attack; the surprising part was that it didn't happen while I was working — I was out bicycling on one of those spectacular California days instead.
I was lucky to survive. And I was even more fortunate to make it through a second heart attack, which happened less than a week later while I was still in the hospital recovering from the first one. I had emergency open-heart surgery, but unfortunately, I was left with extensive damage to my heart and unstable angina.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, angina is "recurring pain or discomfort in the chest that happens when some part of the heart does not receive enough blood."
In other words, when the flow of blood to any part of the heart is temporarily interrupted (usually when an artery is blocked), an angina attack or episode results. By comparison, in a heart attack, the blood flow to the heart is suddenly and permanently cut off, which causes permanent damage to the heart muscle. Usually, the chest pain is worse and lasts longer, but this isn't always the case.
For some people, angina might occur in a predictable pattern, which allows them to regulate their activities and be prepared to deal with the attacks. For those reasons, this is known as "stable angina." What I had, however, was "unstable angina," which is highly unpredictable. There's no warning — unstable angina attacks don't need stress or physical exertion to set them off, and there's no pattern to their frequency and severity. In either case, angina attacks can gradually get worse and eventually lead to a heart attack.
Angina doesn't necessarily guarantee a heart attack, but it does imply issues of heart disease and an increased risk of heart attack. Nitroglycerin is the most commonly prescribed drug for angina, as it widens the blood vessels and allows for greater blood flow to the heart. Another option for some is surgery, such as coronary bypass or balloon angioplasty, either of which would hopefully improve the blood flow to the heart. In bypass surgery, a blood vessel is grafted on to the blocked artery to create a "bypass" for the blood flow. In angioplasty, a catheter with a tiny balloon at the end is inserted into the artery and inflated briefly to widen any narrowed passageways.
My heart was too weak to go through another surgery, so I had to learn to live with the pain as my unstable angina attacks continued mercilessly. It may have been different in other people, but to me, an angina attack felt as if my chest was being squeezed in a vise. The pain varied, but it often radiated from my chest up into my shoulders, arms, and neck. Actually, it hurt so bad that I couldn't always tell exactly where the worst part of it was coming from.
I had to leave my job and stay at home to rehabilitate — I began my program two months after the surgery. I was a mess when rehab began: I had to relearn my grandchildren's names, and I even had to relearn how to write. Some of this was a result of the heart attacks, and some of it came about from being on life support during open-heart surgery. I thought that I could strengthen my heart through exercise, and I was sure that the harder I pushed myself, the faster I would recover and be able to get back to work. I knew that I could heal myself, and that occasional pain meant I was making progress, so I went about my rehab with the same intensity that I'd had put in to my job. But when the angina laid me flat a few times, my cardiologist made me stop all rehabilitation activities altogether.
I went to see my doctor and demanded to know why he couldn't fix things. After all, I needed to get back to work. But I found out that this was no longer the primary concern — now the question was how long I might stay alive. My cardiologist told me that I wasn't going to get better and that my best option was to continue with a drug regimen that would help relieve the angina. Surgery still wasn't a choice for me, as my heart wasn't strong enough to allow me to survive. I sought out other medical opinions and got the same gloomy prognosis.
The reality hit me hard: I wasn't going to be going back to work, I wasn't going to get better, I was no longer the breadwinner, and I wasn't much of a husband or father either. I felt woefully inadequate and responsible for all of my family's problems. I was miserable, and I was making sure that everyone around me was, too-including the person I loved the most-my wife, Nancy. I was always looking to start some kind of an argument with her, making sure that she didn't enjoy herself. After all, why should she be happy if I wasn't?
It was August of 1992. I was 54 years old, and I felt like my life was over. I was sitting around waiting to die, and I spent the next few months simply vegetating. Those were long days. I took pills to get up, pills to stay up, and pills to go to bed. I had no hope and no life. Every day I drove Nancy the few blocks to her office, and picked her up at lunch and at the end of the workday. Even though I shouldn't have been driving, I wanted to share my desolation with her.
After a year of this routine — and why she put up with it for that long, I'll never know — we decided to make a change. Nancy retired from her job; and we moved to Katy, Texas, in April of 1993. This was ostensibly to be closer to our children and grandchildren, but deep down inside, I thought that Nancy wanted to have some occasional relief from dealing with my gloomy attitude. One bonus was that being in a Houston suburb put us conveniently near the country's best medical care. After our move, when I wasn't sitting around home being impossible to live with, I was spending a lot of time at Houston's Methodist Hospital. And as if my heart trouble wasn't enough, pulmonary disease and stress-related anxiety were complicating things further — together, all of this was pushing me to thoughts of suicide. This was why I'd been seeing a psychiatrist.
*** ***
When I told Dr. Attar that I didn't want another dog, she ignored me, as she usually did. She always made me so mad. Some of that anger came from the medication I was taking, but most of it just stemmed from being a raging, frustrated, type-A, macho fool. Since being angry was my only defense, I used it quite often with her. I knew that I was going to die — Dr. Attar couldn't do anything about that, and neither could I. And I didn't care. In fact, I was planning to help the process along. If I could have been sure that my death would have left Nancy with enough money to take care of herself or wouldn't have made the insurance companies ask any questions, I would have ended it in a minute and freed her from her burdens.
Dr. Attar knew this. She'd been treating me for depression and anxiety ever since my arrival in Houston, and she heard my anger, threats, depression, and lies every week without fail. During this session, I started to get out of my chair, but she stopped me cold.
"You just sit right there and listen to me," Dr. Attar said. "Dr. Young and I agree on this: You're not making any progress. You're mad at the world, and you're taking it out on everyone around you, especially Nancy," she scolded. "You need to do something that gets you out of the house, something to get you exercising."
I thought my psychiatrist was supposed to make me feel good, not agitate me.
In one of my first visits to see Dr. Young, my cardiologist, I had a severe angina attack in his office. He admitted me to the hospital right away, and afterward, I told him that I wished he would have just let me die then. I couldn't understand why he wasted his time with me when he could have been saving someone who deserved his time and effort.
Dr. Attar seemed to know that this is how I really felt, in spite of all my best attempts to mislead her into believing that I was okay. "Mike, we need something to work on your mental healing, too. Dr. Young and I think that a therapy dog just might be the answer."
"Why can't I just use Abbey?" I asked, referring to our golden retriever.
"Nancy thinks that Abbey is too hyper for you. You need a quieter dog," she said.
"I don't need any dog," I argued. "I certainly don't need a therapy dog, whatever that is."
Dr. Attar persisted. "You need a diversion. You've got too much time on your hands, and I don't like that. I don't want you quitting on me."
"Yeah, right." I'd already quit, and she knew that, and she knew that each week could be her last shot at me.
I had enough energy to give her a sarcastic response: "Sure, I have a lot to live for, don't I? I never get out of bed, and I'm living on pills 24 hours a day."
I'd been spending a lot of time just trying to figure out how to end it all peacefully. I had my pilot's license, and I thought about just renting a plane and flying off into the sunset. I had also purchased a gun.
And I had all kinds of pills lying around. I knew that I could take a bunch of my antidepressants, or I could just stop taking the heart pills that were keeping me alive — I'd get the desired result either way. What did I have left to live for? I wasn't healthy, my medications weren't doing any good, I couldn't work, I was a burden to my family, my life savings were going down the drain, my marriage was falling apart from the pressure, and I was helpless to do anything about any of it.
"I don't want any more therapy, either from you or some dog. Why don't you all just leave me alone?!" I spat. The truth was, I thought a dog would just get in the way of my plans to end it all.
Dr. Attar read my mind. "Here's your choice: You either go along with this and give it a try, or I'll put you in the hospital right now, where you can be protected from yourself. It's your call."
Well, I may not have been thrilled about how my life was going "on the outside," but I knew that I didn't want to be in any hospital. All the time I had to spend in the doctors' offices was bad enough. I decided that I'd just have to play this game for a while.
"Okay, I'll talk it over with Nancy and we'll figure out how to do this," I told Dr. Attar. But I was really thinking that another dog could just play with Abbey and stay out of my hair.
As I left Dr. Attar's office, I was proud of myself for finally outsmarting her. I admitted to being a lot of things then-bitter, fatalistic, and obstinate all came easily to mind — but I've never been stupid. I'd always had my doctors fully inform me as to what exactly what was going on with my body. I was smart enough to understand what the doctors were telling me, and that's probably why I was so mule-headed about my life. So anyway, I wanted to know what this therapy dog stuff was all about —why were Dr. Attar and Dr. Young suddenly insistent about my getting a dog? Of all people, they should have known that I had my hands full just taking care of myself.
That night, Nancy and I turned to the Internet for some answers to all of the questions we had, such as: What is a therapy dog, what does a therapy dog do, and where do you find one? We found several references to "animal-assisted therapy" and "the human-animal bond" and stories about people visiting nursing homes and schools with their dogs, making senior citizens happy and entertaining kids. There was a continuing theme about the role of animals in improving human health and the quality of life. Delta Society had a tag line of "Animals helping people, people helping animals." The primary objective of Therapy Dogs International was " …
to provide comfort and companionship by sharing the dog with the patients in hospitals, nursing homes, and other institutions … "
The mission of another therapy-dog organization, The Good Dog Foundation, was to use " … professionally trained and supervised adult and animal teams … to aid the healing process in humans and enhance their quality of life." Their tag line was, "Because good dogs are good medicine." But the line that really got my attention was on the Delta Website: "Individuals who have mental illness or low self-esteem focus on themselves; animals can help them focus on their environment. Rather than thinking and talking about themselves and their problems, they watch and talk to and about the animals."
"That pretty much says it all right there, doesn't it?" I asked Nancy. "Maybe these doctors aren't so stupid after all." But just because I found out what they were trying to do for me, that didn't mean that I had to like it. Being resentful and stubborn, trying to make Nancy suffer, and contemplating suicide all required my full attention. A dog would only complicate things.
But Nancy was already making a plan. After all, like most little-boy-and-their-dog stories, she knew that she'd probably be the one stuck with most of the chores, such as feeding, bathing, and letting him or her out. "I think we should get another golden retriever," she said, "so Abbey can play with it, too."
"This isn't a done deal here," I replied. "I'm still not sure I want another dog. I'm just trying to find out what the doctors are thinking."
Just like Dr. Attar, Nancy ignored me. "And I think that we should look into finding a rescue dog," she said.
A rescue dog? I remember thinking. Who's going to rescue me?
We'd been members of the Greater Houston Golden Retriever Club (GHGRC) for the past year or so. We joined when we first came to town, thinking we might find people who shared our interest in that breed, or that we could find "friends" for Abbey. But we found that the club was oriented around dog shows and field trials, and the members really didn't seem to have much interest in us or our dog. But the club's active rescue function got our attention. There are a lot of golden retrievers in this world, and they often end up in shelters for any number of reasons: People move or get a divorce, their lifestyle changes and they no longer have enough time to spend with the dog, there are behavior issues with the dog, the dog gets caught in an abusive situation, or they just aren't working out in their current homes.
In our disposable society, sorry to say, people often just dump the dog in the local shelter to get off the hook. In most shelters, of course, chances are that a dog will end up being euthanized. There just aren't enough homes out there. A lot of purebred dog organizations have taken the initiative to take responsibility for their breeds, and whenever one shows up at the local shelters, or they're abandoned or being mistreated, the dogs are "rescued" by the group, which then tries to find new homes for the animals. Since there are so many golden retrievers, this was a pretty busy activity for the GHGRC. Since we weren't into showing or field trials, Nancy and I (mostly Nancy, of course) dabbled in rescue work for the club, and we even served as a foster home for a couple of dogs temporarily until new homes were found for them.
"Let's call Karen Costello," Nancy said. I started to say something, but she was already dialing.
Nancy reached our friend Karen, who was the rescue chair for the GHGRC. I was listening in on the extension, hoping to find out what she might know about therapy dogs. Nancy told Karen that my doctors had suggested that we find a therapy dog, and that we decided it would be nice if we could find a golden retriever in rescue that might work for us.
Karen knew a little about therapy dogs, and filled in a few of the blanks in our knowledge base. She told us that therapy dogs are individually trained by their owners, and that the training process is varied according to the projected use of the dog. Karen was familiar with Delta Society and suggested that we look further into what they had to offer in the way of advice and documentation. But she also said that she might have a candidate for us right away.
"Let me tell you about this dog named Dakota."
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