A service dog for Jess to meet her health needs

Hi my name is Jess and I’m fundraising in order to get a service dog to help meet both my mental and physical health needs. My professional support team is on board and everyone is in agreement that I would greatly benefit from having a service dog in this time. I am getting lists of medical tests for chronic illness and pain in my stomach. The testing and unknowns have greatly affected my mental health. I have been struggling more with my chronic suicidal ideations, getting overstimulated more easily and dissociating more frequently. The service dog would be a great help with all of these things.

I have been in contact with an organization that has one dog that will be available in the next 12-14 months. I need to raise $5000 so I can secure that dog. Overall I will need $20,000 to 23,000 in order to pay for dog and all of his required training. So it does cost a lot but it will be very beneficial and worth the cost. He will be trained to do about 5 specific tasks to help me function to the best of my abilities in all situations. Since I have been struggling with overstimulation and with my dissociation disorder, the dog will be trained to ground me, keep me in the real world and present. It will be trained to progressively nudge me more and more till I’m able to respond and further use home to ground me. The dog will be trained to ensure I take my required meds and don’t forget (or decide I don’t need to take them anymore.) Be able to detect when I’m about to faint and provide a safe landing. Among other specific tasks to help me thrive and be in a healthy place. Just having a dog that has public access will help my social anxiety and having a dog trained to help will help me sleep as I will feel more safe at night. There is only one dog available at this point so it is important to me to get that initial 5k to secure him. If I don’t secure him I could be waiting several years for another dog to be ready. Sometimes there’s a 5+ year waitlist so it would be amazing to get this one secured.

Thank you all in advance! Your kindness and generosity is greatly appreciated and thoughts and prayers along with social media shares go a long way if you are not able to help financially yourself.