Service Dog for Jessie
Donation protected
The Cause
My name is Jessie Cortez and this is my service dog in-training, Coda. Coda is training at a professional training facility to be my service dog to assist me with severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. I would be so grateful for your help in the unfortunately extremely expensive process of receiving a service dog.
Why Do I Need a Service Dog?
For those of you who know me well, you know why I have PTSD. For those that don’t, please know that I do want to be open and share my story publicly, however, due to legitimate safety concerns, I am not able to.
What I can say is that it has been a very long and hard road for me. I have complex PTSD, meaning I experienced a series of traumatic events as opposed to just one event. My traumas happened throughout childhood, and so I have been struggling with the effects of PTSD for many years. My PTSD has resulted in other severe mental illnesses as well. I have been diagnosed with major depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and developed anorexia nervosa as a negative coping mechanism to deal with my trauma. My battle with my eating disorder as well as my struggle with severe symptoms of PTSD such as intensive dissociative episodes, left me living in and out of hospitals and treatment centers for the past 8 years of my life. I was near death from malnutrition and low-weight, rendered non-verbal due to my trauma, and stuck in an endless cycle of depression and PTSD symptoms which left me confined to inpatient treatment and missing out on life as a young-adult. After some very hard work and amazing therapists, I am now stable enough to live at home. But this is truly where the hard work begins...
How PTSD Impacts My Daily Life Now
With PTSD, I find it nearly impossible to go outside of my apartment. I have severe anxiety and hyper-vigilance, where every noise and movement around me makes my body and brain react as if I were in danger. When I am out in public, whether simply trying to buy groceries or pick up a prescription at CVS, my PTSD causes me to have flashbacks and dissociate- causing me to lose consciousness and leave the present day and the current task I’m attempting to complete. And although I’ve worked on reclaiming my voice in private, in public my PTSD is still so bad that I find I am unable to speak outside of my home or therapist’s office. While at home and in public, I suffer from panic attacks where I hyper-ventilate so long I can pass out, as well as dissociative episodes where I lose consciousness and can end up hurting myself.
How A Service Dog Will Help
This is where Coda comes in! Coda will interact with me when I am in these states of distress, in which I am so anxious and frozen that I don’t even know where I am and therefore have no chance of helping myself. Instead, Coda will take control when my brain is incapable. She will be trained in Deep-Pressure therapy which can be used to do things like snap me out of a flashback or dissociative episode, help me out of a panic attack, keep me safe if I experience a dissociative episode and am unconscious, and/or ground my anxiety before an episode might occur. She will use tasks like forced-petting, touch, and lick in which she either nudges her head under my hand to engage me in petting, or touches my leg with her paw, or licks my arm- all to engage me in sensory grounding to lower my anxiety so that episodes occur less often, so that she can bring me back to the present and I can concentrate on what I am doing, and/or so that I can be calm enough to use my voice in public. She will learn how to use block/cover, a common task taught to PTSD-dogs in which they non-aggressively use their bodies to create comfortable personal-space boundaries either in front or in back of the person- lessening anxiety by knowing the dog is watching their back and by keeping people at a comfortable distance to decrease triggers such as someone accidentally touching them or getting too close. With Coda there by my side, I hope to complete my college education, get a job, and become a functional adult.
Why I Need Your Help
I didn’t choose to get PTSD nor did I choose to experience the traumatic things that I have experienced, but it has now left me with such crippling symptoms that I can’t function safely out in the world and has stolen my late teens and early 20s by confining me to hospitals or to the inside of my home. It seems absurd that such an essential and life-saving tool such as a service dog is not covered through insurance. And yet here I am, a 25-year-old with such severe PTSD that I can’t get a job nor finish school- but left to pay the full cost for the service dog that would help me do these things! And unfortunately, the costs for getting a service dog like Coda are very high.
Any help would be very much appreciated. Also, if you could please share this page with anyone that you can- through your own social media, via email, etc., I would be very grateful! Coda is a very sweet and special dog, and looking at her potential and our future together gives me so much hope even at times when I feel very hopeless. I can’t wait to have her by my side as I continue to build a life despite what has happened to me and despite PTSD! Thank you very much for your consideration and support!
My name is Jessie Cortez and this is my service dog in-training, Coda. Coda is training at a professional training facility to be my service dog to assist me with severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. I would be so grateful for your help in the unfortunately extremely expensive process of receiving a service dog.
Why Do I Need a Service Dog?
For those of you who know me well, you know why I have PTSD. For those that don’t, please know that I do want to be open and share my story publicly, however, due to legitimate safety concerns, I am not able to.
What I can say is that it has been a very long and hard road for me. I have complex PTSD, meaning I experienced a series of traumatic events as opposed to just one event. My traumas happened throughout childhood, and so I have been struggling with the effects of PTSD for many years. My PTSD has resulted in other severe mental illnesses as well. I have been diagnosed with major depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, and developed anorexia nervosa as a negative coping mechanism to deal with my trauma. My battle with my eating disorder as well as my struggle with severe symptoms of PTSD such as intensive dissociative episodes, left me living in and out of hospitals and treatment centers for the past 8 years of my life. I was near death from malnutrition and low-weight, rendered non-verbal due to my trauma, and stuck in an endless cycle of depression and PTSD symptoms which left me confined to inpatient treatment and missing out on life as a young-adult. After some very hard work and amazing therapists, I am now stable enough to live at home. But this is truly where the hard work begins...
How PTSD Impacts My Daily Life Now
With PTSD, I find it nearly impossible to go outside of my apartment. I have severe anxiety and hyper-vigilance, where every noise and movement around me makes my body and brain react as if I were in danger. When I am out in public, whether simply trying to buy groceries or pick up a prescription at CVS, my PTSD causes me to have flashbacks and dissociate- causing me to lose consciousness and leave the present day and the current task I’m attempting to complete. And although I’ve worked on reclaiming my voice in private, in public my PTSD is still so bad that I find I am unable to speak outside of my home or therapist’s office. While at home and in public, I suffer from panic attacks where I hyper-ventilate so long I can pass out, as well as dissociative episodes where I lose consciousness and can end up hurting myself.
How A Service Dog Will Help
This is where Coda comes in! Coda will interact with me when I am in these states of distress, in which I am so anxious and frozen that I don’t even know where I am and therefore have no chance of helping myself. Instead, Coda will take control when my brain is incapable. She will be trained in Deep-Pressure therapy which can be used to do things like snap me out of a flashback or dissociative episode, help me out of a panic attack, keep me safe if I experience a dissociative episode and am unconscious, and/or ground my anxiety before an episode might occur. She will use tasks like forced-petting, touch, and lick in which she either nudges her head under my hand to engage me in petting, or touches my leg with her paw, or licks my arm- all to engage me in sensory grounding to lower my anxiety so that episodes occur less often, so that she can bring me back to the present and I can concentrate on what I am doing, and/or so that I can be calm enough to use my voice in public. She will learn how to use block/cover, a common task taught to PTSD-dogs in which they non-aggressively use their bodies to create comfortable personal-space boundaries either in front or in back of the person- lessening anxiety by knowing the dog is watching their back and by keeping people at a comfortable distance to decrease triggers such as someone accidentally touching them or getting too close. With Coda there by my side, I hope to complete my college education, get a job, and become a functional adult.
Why I Need Your Help
I didn’t choose to get PTSD nor did I choose to experience the traumatic things that I have experienced, but it has now left me with such crippling symptoms that I can’t function safely out in the world and has stolen my late teens and early 20s by confining me to hospitals or to the inside of my home. It seems absurd that such an essential and life-saving tool such as a service dog is not covered through insurance. And yet here I am, a 25-year-old with such severe PTSD that I can’t get a job nor finish school- but left to pay the full cost for the service dog that would help me do these things! And unfortunately, the costs for getting a service dog like Coda are very high.
Any help would be very much appreciated. Also, if you could please share this page with anyone that you can- through your own social media, via email, etc., I would be very grateful! Coda is a very sweet and special dog, and looking at her potential and our future together gives me so much hope even at times when I feel very hopeless. I can’t wait to have her by my side as I continue to build a life despite what has happened to me and despite PTSD! Thank you very much for your consideration and support!
Organizer
Jessie Cortez
Organizer
Brookline, MA