LYMAN, ME (WMTW/CNN) - Addie the dog is alive today thanks to the quick thinking of her owner and a sheriff’s deputy who happened to be at the right place, at the right time.
“That old adage about, ‘Where’s a cop when you need him?’ - he was right there,” said Addie’s owner, Leslie Reynolds.
Addie is always getting into things, especially food, so when Reynolds’ daughter was visiting and she dropped her purse in a chair, Addie went for the gummy worms inside.
But alongside the candy were some pill bottles. Reynolds’ daughter, recovering from a back injury, was legally prescribed Oxycodone.
The two women started counting the missing pills.
“Twenty-five 5 milligrams of Oxy is 125 milligrams, and that’s a huge dose,” Reynolds said of the amount of drugs Addie had in her system,
Addie started to appear lethargic. Reynolds, a registered nurse, didn’t panic. She called the vet, who told her to go to an emergency vet hospital. She knew the closest animal hospital was more than 10 miles away, so she put Addie in the car and headed for the nearby Goodwins Mills Fire Department, hoping they might have a dose of Narcan, the drug used to reverse the effects of narcotics.
“But at the intersection before I got there, I saw two York Sheriff cruisers, and I flagged them down. Sgt. Dave Chauvette entered the picture. Reynolds explained the situation and asked him if he had any Narcan. He did.
“I thought for all of two or three seconds, ‘Yep. This is what we have to do,’” Chauvette said. “Addie and I became really good friends, real quick, and I held her head up, talked to her for a little while, and I gave her half a dose in her right nostril. We waited a few minutes, and I gave her the other half in her left nostril. And it seemed to have the desired effect.”
Reynolds wonders now what might have happened had she not bumped into Sgt. Chauvette.
“Yeah.Of course he’s my hero,” she said of Chauvette. “He saved my puppy.”
“I like happy, positive endings, and oftentimes in law enforcement we don’t get that,” Chauvette said. “So today it’s kind of cool to be part of something like that.”
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