NEED TO KNOW

• Luis Perez decided to get a guide dog in 2024 after years of living with a visual impairment

• His guide dog, Jerry, trained by Dogs Inc, helped him regain independence and manage anxiety and depression

• Jerry detected Perez’s life-threatening blood clot despite not being trained for medical alerts

Luis Perez of Tampa, Fla., expected his guide dog, Jerry, to change his life, but he wasn’t ready for his canine to save him from a medical condition that could’ve turned deadly.

The pair became fast friends in September 2024, after the service dog organization Dogs Inc officially matched them. The black Labrador retriever, trained to be a guide dog for people with visual impairments, made the world, which had begun to feel overwhelming to Perez, more accessible and enjoyable again.

Perez, 47, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and myasthenia gravis at a young age, suddenly lost the majority of his vision at 23 due to complications from the two autoimmune diseases.

“I was legally blind, but I had the help of my kids and my wife to get around and do stuff,” Perez tells PEOPLE on why he held off on getting a guide dog for years. “Fast-forward 18 years, and my oldest daughter goes to the military, and my other one is about to graduate high school. So now I have nobody to help me at home. I’m alone, my wife works. I started falling.”

After two jarring falls, Perez reached out to Dogs Inc for help finding a canine companion that was the right fit for him. A year after he made the first call to Dogs Inc, he was living with 5-year-old guide dog Jerry, who quickly reopened Perez’s world.

“He changed my life. He changed my life a lot,” Perez says of what happened next. With Jerry, Perez felt comfortable taking technology classes, visiting the mall on his own, and flying to Colorado Springs to visit his daughter and meet his granddaughter.

“He helps me out, man, tremendously. Not only is he my guide dog, but he also helps me emotionally. I suffer from anxiety and depression because of my eyesight loss,” Perez explains, adding, “When you hear stuff that you can’t see, that’s what makes me anxious. Jerry takes my anxiety away because I feel like he’s my eyes, so he’s looking around for me.”

It became clear how much Perez’s safety meant to Jerry on what seemed, at first blush, to be an uneventful day in February.

“I was sitting in my recliner, and I had a really bad pain in my left leg. When I went to get up, I almost couldn’t walk. Well, Jerry got up, put his chin on my leg, and pressed down,” Perez remembers.

This pressing motion is something Jerry knows to do when Perez is feeling anxious or stressed, as a way to provide support and grounding for his owner. Usually, Jerry presses on Perez’s leg briefly and then stops when his owner acknowledges him, but on this day in February, “he kept doing it, and he wouldn’t let me stand up,” according to Perez.

Jerry’s owner started to get concerned by the dog’s insistence on keeping his chin pressed against Perez’s sore left leg.

“He’s never done this before. He doesn’t want to let me stand up. He doesn’t want to let me walk,” Perez says.

After waiting for a day or two to see if the pain would go away, Perez and his wife decided to go to the emergency room, mainly because of Jerry’s persistence.

“He kept bothering me and bothering me and bothering me until I couldn’t take it anymore because I got anxious because he was getting anxious,” Jerry’s owner shares. “He didn’t want to work. I would give him certain commands, and he didn’t want to do them. He just wanted to be right next to me as if he hadn’t seen me before in a long time.”

Jerry, Perez, and his wife went to the hospital, and after waiting several hours, learned that Perez had deep vein thrombosis (DVT), a serious condition where a blood clot forms in a deep vein, often in the leg. If left untreated, the clot can travel to the lungs and cause a deadly pulmonary embolism.

“You can die from that,” Perez recalls a nurse telling him about his DVT. “If it keeps going, it’ll go to your lungs and then go to your heart.”

“It ended up being a big blood clot, and it could have killed me,” he adds.

Perez was in the hospital for four days to treat his DVT. Jerry stayed by his owner’s side for the majority of his hospitalization.

The Lab’s detection of and reaction to Perez’s DVT made the dog owner’s growing admiration for Jerry skyrocket. While Jerry is trained to assist Perez as a guide dog, he was never trained to detect DVT or perform other medical alerts.

“That’s what blew my mind. He’s not trained for that,” Perez says, noting that Dogs Inc was also amazed to hear of Jerry’s heroics.

“I feel like he’s an angel wrapped in fur,” Perez shares of his guide dog, adding, “If it weren’t for his concern, I wouldn’t have gone to the hospital and gotten checked out. He saved me.”

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Since returning home from the hospital, Perez and Jerry have resumed visiting the gym, cooking meals, and going on adventures to explore new parks and museums. Their bond is stronger than ever.

“We have that deep connection that I have never had with any other animal or any other being,” Perez says.

To learn more about Dogs Inc and its work with service dogs, including how animal lovers can help raise a puppy to be a service dog, visit the organization’s website.

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