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Carlos Aguilar channel icon Carlos AguilarOriginal creator 4M views Save

A dog she'd never met pulled her from a wreck

Shannon came to with breath on her face. She had been thrown from her car on a winding road in South Georgia, and a dog she had never seen was up on the car beside her. more

It began with a bad argument with her husband and a road the locals call NASCAR Road, because people tend to speed on it. Shannon was speeding too. She turned onto a winding stretch, took the first curve fine, and on the second the car fishtailed. It pulled her out of the driver's seat and threw her through the back glass.

She came to on the back of her car, her legs in the back seat and her upper body across the trunk. She was in a lot of pain and had no idea what had happened. Worse, the way the car had gone in, nobody driving past would have seen her.

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The way the car came to rest, no driver on the road could have seen Shannon.

That's when she felt him. A dog had jumped up onto the back of the car, a dog Shannon says she didn't know “from Adam's house cat.” Her face was bleeding, and he began to lick it. “He come across me, and I thank God that he did.”

She blacked out again. The next time she came to, he had turned her around and had her halfway off the car, tugging at her shirt and her jacket. He wouldn't give up. “That dog had more thrive for life at that point than I did,” she says. He dragged her all the way to the edge of the road.

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Shannon remembers him tugging at her shirt and jacket until she was at the edge of the road.

There, Shannon wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled herself up. It was the first time she had stood since the crash. A vehicle stopped, and she leaned in and asked the driver to please call her husband. Then she passed out again.

A middle-aged woman wearing a beige ribbed sweater in an indoor setting with a staircase and purple-painted walls, suggesting daytime. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Shannon came to with breath on her face.

She woke up in the hospital with a small bleed in her brain. The doctors waited to see whether she would need surgery, and she didn't. She healed at home, and she's sure about why. “If he hadn't, I probably wouldn't even be here today.”

The dog went to a search and rescue trainer, who's teaching him wilderness work. He loves to run the woods and find whoever has been hidden there, then comes bolting back, thrilled with himself. The plan is to get him certified, and one day to see him in urban search and rescue, finding people alive in collapsed buildings.

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His trainer hopes he will one day search collapsed buildings for people still alive.

He saved a life without any training. With the right training, the hope is that he could save many more. His name came from one simple line, “You'll always be my hero,” and that's what everybody started to call him. Hero.

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