Do you believe in sagip, which literally means “to save?” Specifically, do you believe that the animals we take care of can absorb illness, negativity and even death in our place?

 

The concept has been talked about for as long as I can remember. I’ve always believed in it, although it has never happened to me. It seems consistent with the nature of well-loved animals to give their lives for their masters. Also, I have heard of many, many cases where the coincidence was just too uncanny.

 

And then, I was saved, I think. After I was diagnosed with breast cancer in June, I held the faces of our two dogs—my 4-year-old asPin, Kikay, and the family’s 12-year-old black Labrador, Larry—in my hands and ordered them, “Don’t get any ideas.”

 

I made sure Larry in particular was paying attention, because, to paraphrase a beautiful piece I once read, he already had that occasionally glazed, faraway look of an animal whose sights were now set beyond this world, and whose back was becoming hunched because it was beginning to grow the wings that would eventually carry him off to the Rainbow Bridge in doggie heaven.

 

Larry has been a faithful constant in our lives all these years, and I knew that the once playful fellow was nearing the end of his journey. “Especially you,” I said, planting a kiss (through my protective face mask) on his big black nose.

 

When my chemotherapy started, I lost sleep some nights worrying about cardiomyopathy, a weakening of the heart muscles that is a possible side effect of exposure to such powerful drugs.

 

Emergency

 

Some time after my fourth chemo session, Larry began coughing very loudly one afternoon, and seemed to have difficulty breathing. We rushed him to the vet in what would turn out to be an emergency, when his body temperature went up a potentially fatal 40.4 °C and his heart rate hit 240 beats per minute. The doctors injected him with sedatives and put him on oxygen. He survived, but the old boy was exhausted.

 

After an ultrasound of his heart and a thorough check-up, the diagnosis floored me: cardiomyopathy. I knew in my heart he had taken the bullet for me.

 

“Sagip doesn’t have to be absolute,” says my acupuncturist Dr. Eddie Concepcion, a firm believer in energy and how we absorb it from the world around us. Because my chemotherapy drugs had also raised my own body temperature, Eddie was convinced Larry had literally “taken the heat” for me, as well; thus, the heatstroke.

 

“I believe in sagip because it has happened to me, colleagues and clients more than once,” says veterinarian Dr. Marga de la Rosa-Carpio, a partner with the renowned Vets in Practice (VIP) animal hospitals and a believer in alternative remedies for animals. “I noticed that it usually happens suddenly, like a healthy animal with no health problems will fall acutely ill, and usually with the same illness as the owner or a close relative.”

 

Doc Marga recounts how a client brought in a young beagle who was diagnosed with renal failure—just as the client’s father was beginning dialysis. Most dramatically, faulty wiring caused Doc Marga’s own parents’ house to burn down one evening. Her parents and two helpers lived in that house, and they were all safe—but two cats and two dogs perished.

 

Another friend of mine will never forget exactly when her then bedridden, comatose mother regained consciousness: 10:30 in the morning. That was the exact same time the family dog ran out into the street and was hit by a car.

 

And then there is the story of my fellow breast cancer survivor Bibeth Orteza, whose two dogs—a Labrador named Laika and a German shepherd named Marga—developed breast cancer and, she firmly believes, spared her.

 

“Two years after I was diagnosed in 2004, our vet, Dr. Jessie Pavino, felt a lump near Laika’s second right-side nipple. It was a bad one, we were told, and soon enough, another lump came out. ‘Do dogs have cancer?’ we asked, and the vet said, sure they do—but for some reason, only when someone else in the family has it.”

 

Bibeth recalls Dr. Pavino saying, in tears, “Ewan ko ho kung naniniwala kayo sa sagip, but I’ve seen a great number of dogs go, as if saving the lives of someone else in the family.”

 

“Of course, I didn’t believe him, but was too polite to tell him,” Bibeth recalls. “We agreed to have Laika’s lumps taken out, and along with [them], two of her breasts. We were both doing well, health-wise.”

 

Then in 2008, Bibeth started to get paranoid about her health again, without knowing why. She eventually got a clean bill of health—but Laika didn’t.

 

Disconsolate

 

Bibeth still remembers how Laika walked calmly to the vet before she was put down, “as if she knew he was there to end her misery.”

The family German Shepherd Marga was “disconsolate” at Laika’s loss, but incredibly, was also diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after.

 

“We lost her the same way we did Laika,” Bibeth says, still in tears at the memory. “Laika and Marga took care of me.”

 

“Why do I think it happens? I think animals are pure spirits, like furry guardian angels that walk with us on earth,” says Doc Marga. “They may have been given the mission by our Creator to save us. I believe pets can often choose to make the ultimate sacrifice, too.”

 

Like most things beyond the realm of logic, maybe all of these can be (forcibly) explained through science, coincidence, etc. Larry is an old dog, and a weak heart would be completely expected.

 

Still, as I heard a wise priest say recently, people can say what they want—but it’s the heart that decides, because it’s the heart that hangs on to prayers, and to things we cannot see.

 

In his beautiful book “Going Home: Finding Peace When Pets Die”—for me, hands down, the best book I’ve read on coping with such grief—Jon Katz wrote his lovely version of what a letter from a dog would read like, in the light of which sagip makes perfect sense:

 

“By now, you must know that there is always a goodbye hovering in the shadow of a dog. We are never here for long, or for long enough. We were never meant to share all of your life, only to mark its passages. We come and we go. We come when we are needed. We leave when it is time. Death is necessary. It defines life.”

 

Larry is at home and stable now, but will have to be on medicines for the rest of his life. How long that will be remains unclear; survival of cardiomyopathy in dogs ranges from three months to three years, the vet said, but since Larry is the canine equivalent of a grumpy 80-year-old man, then we should be prepared for anything.

 

“I told you not to get any ideas,” I reminded him today, after he ate a piece of banana (stuffed with two pills) from my hand.

 

Then he licked my hand, lay down, sighed and stared off into the distance, seeing something only my old, fading warrior could see.