Blu the service dog needs surgery

My name is Nicole Poppic. I am a veteran of the United States Army.  I have a service dog named Blu who is in pain and in need of surgery in both of his knees. Where should I begin? In order to accomplish what I am setting out to do, I have to do two things I hate doing. Ask for help and share my vulnerabilities. I have a really hard time doing either, so please bear with me.
 
I joined the military when I was just 17 years old. I came from an abusive home and literally had nowhere to go if I didn’t stay and allow the abuse to continue. I spent some time couch-surfing and I even spent a few nights on the street. The Army took me in and became my family. Basic training was hard, but I loved it. I went to my first duty station, Camp Red Cloud, Korea, excited about being a part of the army for as long as they would let me. About halfway through my time in Korea, I became a statistic that no one likes to talk about and from that point on, I counted down the days to the end of my enlistment. Did you know that last year over six thousand service men and women were sexually assaulted by a fellow service member? And that is only the ones who reported it. The VA and DoD refer to this as MST (Military sexual trauma).
 
I told my squad leader what happened to me and even showed her my bruises and was told that I must be mistaken and that she had known “SGT P” for a very long time and knew his wife and his family and he was a good man. It was pretty similar to the speech I had gotten when I was 15 and told about the early morning visits my stepfather had been paying me. I decided at that point that it must be something about me that caused these incidents to happen to me and had to have somehow been my fault. I became ashamed and didn’t tell anyone else for a very long time. I spent many years having unhealthy interactions with men, including an unhealthy marriage when I was only 19. I was fortunate enough to meet an amazing man and marry again when I was 25. This time, my husband saw how I was struggling and he encouraged me to get help.
 
When I finally was ready, I reached out to the VA for counseling services and assistance. The referral I got to receive Blu was the best part of that process and the piece of the puzzle that had been missing. Blu is trained in non-violent protection and in anxiety treatments such as tactile stimulation and pressure points. What did that mean for me? Well, it meant I could start venturing out of my home and doing things without my husband. It meant I wasn’t so high-strung and yelling at my children when my anxiety made me feel like I couldn’t make it through a day of normal parenting tasks. It meant no longer running out of the grocery store or the post office in tears because the smell of someone’s cologne or the color of their eyes gave me flashbacks. Blu senses my raising anxiety and he walks a circle around me to make sure people stay out of my “bubble”, then he provides the distraction of repeatedly touching my hand with his nose or licking my hand until I start focusing on him and stop going back to the dark places in my past. If all else fails, he will lean against me to try and get me to sit down and then he backs up onto my lap and presses his weight against the trunk of my body to provide comfort (kind of like a weighted blanket).
 
Since receiving Blu in 2016, I have stopped yelling at my children, I go to the grocery store and run all the other “grown up” errands. I even went back to school full time. I have survived endometrial cancer (resulting in a hysterectomy at 34) and a mild heart attack with Blu’s comforting presence. In December of this year, I will graduate with my degree in magnetic resonance imaging. I plan on continuing further in my education and getting an additional degree in computed tomography imaging when I am done. I don’t need to take anxiety meds multiple times a day. Blu helped me take back a part of myself. Blu’s help couldn’t have come at a better time, either. My husband who helped me to help myself got injured in Afghanistan and now I take care of him in a lot of ways that I couldn’t if Blu hadn’t helped me first.
 
Now that Blu is hurting, I can’t take him out very much because it hurts him to walk for very long. I still have to go to class, and I am distracted and anxious throughout the day and Blu cries on the couch when I leave. I cannot afford to have Blu’s knees fixed. I am a full time student who is living off of my housing stipend and mine and my husband’s disability from the VA. I need help. I hate saying those three words, by the way. I hate feeling vulnerable and putting myself and my problems out there. But, Blu needs me to help him. So, for all the times he has stood by me and helped me, here I am.
 
 
Please help me to help Blu.