Woman's Best Friend: Dog Saves Her Life

ST. LOUIS, Missouri (KSDK)--For some, work is their life; for Mary Phillips, work saved hers.

As a supervisor for Barnes-Jewish Hospice Care, Phillips meets regularly with other nurses like Pat Harlan, but Pat's the only one who always brings her dog, Jacque-Pierre, a seven-year-old Malti-poo (a Maltese poodle hybrid).

"All the girls love him. He gets a lot of attention," said Harlan.

Until recently, Phillips wasn't much of a dog lover. It was last October when Phillips was in her office on the phone with her daughter.

"All of a sudden she stopped talking and I thought we'd lost our connection," said Missy Stoecker, Phillips' daughter.

"Just out of the blue, I got a terrible headache," said Phillips.

It was so bad that Mary decided to lie down on her office floor.

Despite pleas from her co-workers, she refused to go to the hospital until Pat and Jacque-Pierre walked into her office.

"Pierre came into my office and just started going wild and licking my head. Licking, licking, licking my head," Phillips said.

Some studies have actually shown that dogs can recognize illness and as a hospice nurse, Phillips said she's seen that for herself. She said animals can sometimes tell you more than the patient.

The way Jacque-Pierre was acting, she agreed to go to the hospital.

"The dog convinced me. The dog started my miracle," Phillips said.

A few hours later, neurosurgeons at Barnes-Jewish Hospital rushed Mary into the operating room for what turned out to be a ten hour surgery.

"They looked at me and they said, 'she has a very large aneurism in her head,'" Stoecker said.

As you might imagine, Mary Phillips now loves dogs.

"They told me I was a miracle. An absolute miracle," she said.

These days, Phillips feels like her old self and has even quit smoking. So does Jacque-Pierre know he's a hero?

"Well, he's pretty conceited," Harlan said.

"Pierre started my miracle and everybody else carried it through," Phillips said. "And I'm very thankful to be here."

And Jacque-Pierre has proven to truly be a man's best friend; or in this case, a woman's best friend.