Cameron is a typical 13 year old boy who loves to play video games and ride his bike. He also loves to play with his cars and trucks, and go swimming.
However, things were never very easy for Cameron from the very beginning. When he was born, his stomach was not attached to his esophagus and he was flown to another hospital to have a 7 hour surgery, where they gave him a 50/50 chance to live. However, our little survivor pulled through. That was the first challenge in his life, and since then he has many others to deal with. Cameron was diagnosed with autism, an intellectual disability, and most recently, epilepsy. Cameron has always struggled with anxiety and has repetitive behaviors, but ever since the seizures have started his behaviors have changed. He now has a lot of meltdowns and becomes more confrontational. He seems much more distressed and not at peace many times. It makes us very sad to see our sweet little boy this way.
Cameron is very excited that he has been accepted to get a service dog. We feel a service dog could add a lot value to his life. The service dog could help to calm him when having a meltdown, help to disrupt repetitive behaviors, help with his anxiety (especially with all his doctors appoints, he gets very anxious), form a social bridge with other kids, help with life skills and responsibility with caring for the dog, and alert if Cameron is having a seizure.
We would greatly appreciate any support you could give!
Contribute to Cameron’s dog below
Training a service dog to meet our child’s requirements can be very costly. On average it costs between $40,000-60,000 to raise, train, and place a service dog at 4 Paws for Ability. While 4 Paws for Ability fundraises to help cover a significant portion of this cost, families are tasked with raising $20,000 of that amount or $23,000 if receiving a poodle, doodle or papillon. We hope that we can receive assistance from our beloved family and friends to help make our service dog dream a reality.