Posts in Category: AHF Grant Recipients

Noreen Sturges, who lost her 15-year-old canine companion Papillon last year, found a replacement a few months ago in Lulu, a female Maltese. “Lulu was rather matted, had a hacking cough and needed care and lots of love,” Noreen said.

Lulu had belonged to a family that was no longer able to provide her with the care and attention she needed.  When Lulu was brought to Noreen’s home, “it was love at first sight,” she said.

Noreen hired a groomer to attend to Lulu’s matted hair.  After the grooming, Noreen took Lulu to Monarch Veterinary Hospital in Laguna Niguel not far from her home.  

Dr. Kelly Alcala examined her and found some serious dental issues that would require surgery and the extraction of some teeth. Lulu also had a hacking cough – “not like she would have had with a cold,” Noreen said.  Dr. Alcala told her that she thought decay from the dog’s teeth was getting into her digestive system and probably causing the cough, Noreen said.

The doctor suggested that Noreen apply for a Boydston Grant to help pay for Lulu’s treatment and surgery.  A grant of $500 was approved and Dr. Alacala did the surgery.  The dog is now thriving, Noreen said, and the hacking cough is gone. 

Lulu is eating her new diet voraciously.  “And she’s a love!” Noreen said. “Everything’s good now.”  The dog, she said, “is running around – up and down the stairs and all over the place.

“I didn’t think I could ever love a dog as much as my Papillon, “but I just love Lulu.”

She added that she is grateful for the help provided by her Boydston grant and the matching sum from Monarch Hospital, as well as for the work of Dr. Alcala.  “I just love her, too,” she said.

Noreen said that she and Lulu “are having a lovely time together.  She is quite a companion.”

Spooky, a beautiful black and white, mostly wild cat, came into the Sparacinos’ lives in October, 2008. 

“I thought she was an angel who had descended on us,” Donna Sparacino said.  “She would drop down from the roof onto our deck and then come through our sliding glass doors into the main area of our two-level apartment and have lunch with our Maine Coon cat.

“But when my husband Terrell and I would come home from work, she wouldn’t let us get close.  She would zip out the sliding door, jump up on the roof and she’d be gone.  She was very skittish.”  (The Sparacinos left their patio door ajar when they were gone so Dougal, the Maine Coon, could go out on the patio.)

Spooky’s route to the roof was up a short flight of steps near the San Clemente unit’s front door, then a leap of about five feet to the eave of the roof and a short walk to a spot on the roof above the patio.

“Dougal adopted Spooky before we did,” Donna said.  “I couldn’t tell you how many times we’d come home and she was in the house until one day I saw her being groomed by Dougal.  And I thought, ‘Whoa.  I guess there’s a connection going on here.’”

In December, 2008, Donna and Terrell found Spooky near their front door with a dime-sized hole in her back from a BB gun pellet.  They took her to Dr. Kelly Alcala, who was working at Canyon Animal Hospital in Laguna Beach. She treated the wound but the pellet remains lodged in the cat’s lung.

That brought Spooky into the Sparacino apartment permanently.  “We knew we had to keep her off the streets and inside our home,” Donna said.

Dougal died in November but another male cat, Teddy, had been  added to the household about a year ago.  When Dr. Alcala moved to Monarch Veterinary Hospital in Laguna Niguel, Donna and her cats followed her there.

“My description of her, No. 1, is compassion,” Donna said.  “You find a vet that feels what you feel and they just know. And it’s all for the best interest of the animal.”

Donna took Spooky to see Dr. Alcala for her wellness checkup last September at Monarch Hospital. The veterinarian recommended dental treatment for inflamed gums and heavy tartar.

But, Donna said, “things are kind of tight around here.  I’m on my fixed social security income.  And Terrell had lost his job in March of 2020.  We thought maybe we could let the senior [blood] panel go – part of the wellness checkup – but Dr. Alcala said: ‘You really need to have the blood panel before you get any work done on the teeth.’  We wanted to wait a little bit before doing the teeth. 

“But she said, ‘You know what?  Because you’re seniors on a fixed income, and all the things that are going on [such as Covid], there’s a possibility you can get some help.’”

The doctor suggested applying to the Animal Health Foundation’s Boydston Fund, which helps senior citizens.  Donna did and was granted $500, an amount matched by the hospital.  

“I was so ecstatic, Donna said.  “Are you kidding me?  It’s like nothing else mattered with my Christmas.  That was just pure joy.  I said to Terrell: ‘Look at what we’re being given! Maybe this is an indication of a better year ahead.’”

The dental work was done on December 27.  Dr. Glenn Craft, who owns Monarch, extracted Spooky’s left upper canine tooth.  After the procedure, Donna said, “Dr. Craft sat with us in the lobby and talked with us.  Then we talked with Dr. Alcala.  They are amazing.”

Spooky, who got her name because she first showed up at the Sparacino apartment during the Halloween season in 2008, is feeling much better now.  “She’s all about belly rubs.  I’ll be sitting at my desk and she’ll come and start head bumping my elbow, like ‘I need attention now.’ 

“I feel like we’re so blessed.  We have the Christmas gift of Spooky’s health. It makes us so happy.  Our cats are our family.”  Teddy, the new kid of the household, was adopted to be a companion to Spooky.  “He’s a little rambunctious,” Donna said.  “We were hoping for a little more mature male cat but we’re not giving up on him.”

For more information about the Animal Health Foundation’s Angel Fund CLICK HERE

Yelena and her mother have been rescuing dogs and cats they find on the streets near their Reseda home for years, often finding them homes, if they cannot locate their owners.

That’s how they found Mila nearly two years ago.  A Poddle mix, she “was running around and she was in horrible condition,” said Yelena, who asked that Pulse not use her full name.  “She clearly had not been eating well and she was covered with fleas.  I had to give her three baths, one after the other. 

“We tried to find her owner.  She did not have a chip.  We posted a description of her and some people contacted us and said they thought she was their dog.  But none of them sent us a picture of her and we ended up keeping her.  I think we gave her a really good life.”

A few months ago, Yelena noticed that Mila “was straining to pee. I checked her and there was no blood.  But I took her to the vet, who asked if I had seen any blood and if Mila was eating.  The vet prescribed antibiotics, thinking the problem might be an infection. 

“That seemed to help her a little bit. But then I took her to the dog park and every five seconds she was squatting down and acting like she was going to pee.  And I decided I would take her either to the emergency clinic or the vet.  Then I looked again and I finally saw some blood.”

Yelena called VCA McClave Animal Hospital not far from her home.  “I told them exactly what was going on.  They said this was an emergency, since there was blood, and to bring her in.  Dr. Carina Cortez told me that they would prefer to do x-rays and a few other procedures,” Yelena said.

 “I was thinking, oh this poor dog!  When Dr. [Nada] Khalaf [co-medical director at McClave] called me after she saw the dog, she told me: ‘We can’t keep giving her antibiotics – we would just be going in circles.’”

Dr. Khalaf said that she saw the stone shadow on an ultrasound.  She told Yelena that she suspected stones but needed radiographs to confirm they were there.  When the x-rays were taken, they showed “two enormous stones in her tiny bladder,” Yelena said.  

“I said that I wanted to help the dog, but I really couldn’t financially, and I asked if there was any kind of financial plan I could do.  And Dr. Khalaf said she could refer me to Angel Fund.  I had never heard of Angel Fund.  She said: ‘I don’t know how much they can help you’ but that she would call and we would see. 

“And I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, maybe they would help!’  Dr. Khalaf called back and said Angel Fund would help.  I was thinking maybe $100 or $300. But the doctor said they would do more – $1,000 – and the hospital also would help, matching the grant, and that they would help me open a CareCredit account. 

Dr. Cortez performed the surgery to remove the stones.

“I was really so grateful,” Yelena said.  “I am just very, very thankful.”  She also expressed gratitude to Dr. Khalaf: “She’s the one who helped set everything up.”

She also said that she would “rate Angel Fund at 200 on a scale of 100.”  The day she learned that she was getting the grant “was a very emotional day for me.”

Mila is now doing well, she said.  “After the surgery we had some antibiotics and pain medication.  She was told to keep Mila from running and jumping for two weeks but the dog wanted to do just that.  She now urinates normally.  “She’s 100 percent different from the way she was in the dog park.

“Mila is a very special dog.”

Prince, an 18-year-old Maine Coon cat, came into Delores Johnson’s life some 15 years ago when she wanted to bring a cat into her home after her aging father had been taken to a care facility.

“I’ve always had cats,” Delores said.  “I didn’t think my dad would be coming back [to the mobile home she had shared with him].  So I went on petfinder.com and there were these two cats – Prince and his brother from another mother – a black short-haired domestic cat.” Both animals were about three years old and were available because their family was moving to Europe.

“The woman who owned the animals brought them over.  They were both in a carrier and, when she opened it, they ran under the bed in the closest bedroom.  They stayed under the bed for at least a week,” she said.

“I would try to familiarize myself with them and talk to them.  They had been with their first family from the time they were six weeks old,” Delores said.  “The black cat originally was named Madonna. The cats were named by the family’s daughter, who thought the black cat was female.  When they went to get them fixed, they found out that Madonna was not female.  So they added an ‘n’ to his name and he became Mandonna.

Three years ago, Mandonna was afflicted by late-stage kidney failure and Delores had to put him down.”

“Prince was always my scaredy cat,” she said.  “He was always under the bed. He was never the social cat.  Mandonna was more the Alpha cat.  he was always the talker.  He was the one who would sleep next to me. He was the one who would eat anything I put in front of him, whereas Prince would only eat what he wanted to eat.” 

Once Mandonna was gone, Prince blossomed, Delores said.  “His personality started to develop and he became more animated. he came out from under the bed.  He’s now ‘his royal highness’ and he walks through the house and talks and yowls.”

But about three years ago, she said, she noticed that, “from the middle of his spine to his tail end, Prince was starting to get skinny.  He looked like a weightlifter: the front part of his body was real big and developed but the back part of his body was skinny.”

She took him to Fairview Pet Hospital in Costa Mesa to see Dr. Hongwon Kang.  (She calls him Dr. K.)  The doctor told her after his examination that Prince was in the early stages of kidney failure.  “I told him I could only do so much [financially] because I have limited resources.  They gave Prince his rabies shot and didn’t charge me.  That was nice. 

“The plan was that I would bring him in once a week for injections to keep him hydrated.  The bags of hydrating solution were $65 and they would last about 10 weeks. I was driving there because there was no way I could bring those bags home and give Prince the shots.  But it’s a 40-mile round trip from where I live in Anaheim to the hospital.”

Delores made the trip every week for two years.  “It was costing me $85 a month, since I purchased a bag of the solution every month and also paid for a $20 flea treatment.  Dr. K never charged me for the injections.  We also did blood work periodically and I’d have to save to pay for that.”  But, she said, Prince was doing pretty well. 

Dr. Kang wanted to put Prince on a special diet, Delores said.  “But Prince said, ‘Absolutely not.  I am not eating that food.’  I told the doctor, he won’t eat it and I am not paying for food he won’t eat. ‘That’s fine,’ Dr. K said.  ‘He’s an old man.  We’ll just feed him what he wants.’”

After two years, Delores said, Dr. Kang told her that he’d like to give Prince the shots twice a week.  But she was not receptive to that idea.  “I can’t do this anymore,” she said.  “I told him that we should just let nature take its course.”

But that brought new concerns.  She knew that she would need money to put her pet down, eventually.  She expected that to cost about $350.  And her application for CareCredit was turned down, despite the fact that she had other credit cards, including American Express and Walmart.

She called Fairview Hospital and was told about Angel Fund and that she should come in and the clinic would help her with an application.  She listed the things she would like to finance, including bloodwork and an x-ray, because Prince had constipation occasionally, as well as money for euthansia. 

Dr. Kang listed the charges that he expected for treating Prince on his submission and Delores soon learned that she would receive a grant.  She then resumed her weekly trips to the hospital for injections.    

“Dr. K has been wonderful,” Delores said.  “I was very fortunate and thankful that there was an Angel Fund and that my application was approved.  I get Social Security once a month and I don’t have two plugged nickels left to rub together for anything extra.”

Prince’s blood work showed that he was doing better, she said. “As of right now,” she said in a recent interview, “his kidneys seem to be stabilized.  He is doing fine.”

When Dr. K told her that her application had been approved, she said: “Praise the Lord.  I was very, very pleased.  It was a wonderful, wonderful blessing.  I’m a born-again Christian and I believe everything is in God’s hands.”

Early in May, Allyson Vaquera noticed that Guido, her nine-year-old pit bull terrier, was having some problems. 

“He had an accident or two in the house – peeing accidents – that I really didn’t think anything about at first,” Allyson said.  “Sometimes that happens when he’s left inside too long.  But it happened again and I noticed a couple of spots of blood.

“Then Guido started to throw up and he didn’t want to eat.  And I noticed that he had problems having a bowel movement.  The combination of all those things made me really decide that he ought to see the doctor.”

She took the dog to Northridge Pet Hospital, where she works as a receptionist.  Dr. Marissa Williams treated the dog.  The hospital “did blood work and a urine test to see if there was an infection and then an -x-ray,” Allyson said. “That’s when they saw the stone in his bladder.  It was a very big stone and the only option was to have it surgically removed.”

Allyson said that the cost of the surgery was more than she and her husband, David, could afford.  “Because of Covid, David hasn’t had steady work in a long time and we’ve been struggling.  We had to decide what we could do and euthanasia was the last thing from our minds.”

The hospital said that Angel Fund might be able to help, although it had not used the service in some time.  After checking, the hospital helped her apply.  She received a $500 grant that was matched by the hospital.  She also found another charitable group that helped with a grant of $200. 

“I only had to come up with a few hundred dollars,” she said.  “Angel Fund was like a sigh of relief.  You just have so much stress and anxiety, thinking about how you’re going to help a member of your family when financially you just can’t do it,” she said.

 Guido had his surgery on May 13.  Allyson took him home that evening. “He pretty much slept the rest of the day,” she said. “The doctor said not to feed him that night. But when I fed him the next day he seemed pretty much back to normal. He didn’t seem to be in any discomfort. It was almost like nothing had happened.

“The stitches were taken out two weeks later and he got the cone off and he was back to his regular activity.  He’s doing great now.”

Guido is the protector and buddy of her younger son, Calyx, 8, Allyson said.  He was acquired as puppy.  “We had another dog and we lived in an apartment so we had to take him out for walks multiple times a day.  David was walking him one day and somebody drove up and told him that they had a new puppy and weren’t allowed to have a dog where they lived. They asked if we could take him.

“My husband came home and he showed me this little white puppy.  And I said, ‘Oh my gosh, where did this puppy come from?  You went out to take our dog for a walk and you come back with this puppy!’  That’s how we got him.

“We decided then that we could not live in an apartment anymore.  We’d have to get a house.  And that’s what happened.  We needed a yard with our two dogs.”

Allyson and David have an older son, Nathan, who is 13.

“I fell into a deep depression, coming home and seeing her not eating and getting weaker by the day,” Alex said.

“Oreo was urinating a lot,” his wife Rosalinda said.  “I told Alex that I think she has a bladder infection or some other kind of infection.  We took her to the animal hospital and the veterinarian told us she had stones in her bladder.  “The surgery was really expensive and we just didn’t have any money.”

“Oreo was getting sicker and sicker and we just couldn’t see her like that,” Alex said.  The couple decided to take the dog to the SPCA, hoping that the organization might be able to take care of her surgery and then find her a new home.

Alex, terribly depressed at the thought of giving up his dog, took a binder he had kept that had all Oreo’s health and other records.  “The young lady there [at SPCA] told me, ‘Wow, she’s a well-loved dog!  I‘ve never seen a binder like this.’

“I said, ‘Oh, I love her.’ I was crying when I handed her over.” Alex said.  “I said I wanted to surrender the binder with Oreo.  I thought the right thing to do was to surrender her so they could help her.”

Depressed and saddened, Alex and Rosalinda returned to their home in Hawthorne.  The next day, the SPCA called them and suggested that they call the Animal Hospital of South Bay and ask about Angel Fund, Rosalinda said.

“They said Angel Fund could help us,” she said.  “I talked to a lady at the hospital and she said, ‘OK, let me find out a few things.’ She called back later and said Oreo was scheduled for surgery that day.  I said, ‘Wait, she’s at the SPCA.’  She said, ‘No, we picked her up.  And Angel Fund is going to help you.’  That felt really good.”

When Alex returned home, Rosalinda told him that Oreo’s surgery had been scheduled and the hospital wanted to know if he would like to see her before the operation.

“I said, yeah! It was the happiest day of my life. It was better than anything in the world.”

At the hospital the reunion of man and dog was an emotional moment.  “She jumped out of the lady’s arms and into my arms and she’s kissing me and licking me,” Alex said. “It was amazing, it was amazing!  I’ll never forget how she looked at me and she was crying like a baby.”  So was Alex.

“Angel Fund made a depressed person very, very happy,” Alex said. “If they didn’t do what they did, I told Rosalinda, I needed to check myself into the mental hospital and she asked why.  I said, ‘Because I can’t live without Oreo.  If she goes, I’m going to go.  I can’t live without her.’  So Angel Fund actually saved two lives.

“I told my therapist that I was thinking about killing myself.  I really, really did.  I was very, very depressed without her.”

Alex has a learning disability and has been unable to read or write.  He has been working hard to change that and now can read at a third-grade level.  “My spelling is really bad but I can read signs and I am learning,” he said.

He has worked when family members have helped him find jobs. In one instance, he was fired from a job his brother had helped him find.  His employer gave him written instructions and told him to read them so he would know what to do.  When Alex said he couldn’t read the instructions, he was fired.

He is also diabetic.  He credits his dog with saving his life when he fell into a diabetic coma in 2016.  Oreo bit him hard enough to wake him up but not break his skin, he said.

“I was on the floor and I went into the kitchen to grab something to eat – a piece of candy or something.   She was crying and pulling on my shirt.  she knew that I was sick.  she started nibbling on my ear.”

He finally reached up and found a donut and that helped get him back on track, he said.

He and Rosalinda live with his son, although they are now divorced.  The son and Rosalinda are his caretakers, Alex said.  Alex has his own bedroom and Rosalinda shares a room with his granddaughter.  “We get along better than when we were married,” he said.

Oreo – a Chihuahua-Jack Russel mix – is doing very well, he said.  “She’s terrific – running around, getting a little chubby. But she’s great.”  The dog is now six years old.

Tim Genoway, who had not worked in four years, was concerned about his dog, Miss Kallie, earlier this year.

“I went to two or three veterinarians’ offices and I could see she wasn’t getting any better,” he said.  Then I went to a practice in Orange.  I was practically out of money and they wouldn’t start treating her condition without any kind of money.

“I was like, my dog’s dying here.  I know she is.  and they would say, ‘Yeah, I know she is. This is serious but we’ve got to have some kind of deposit.’

“I was at my wit’s end. I didn’t know what to do.  I made a sign that said I needed help with vet care.  somebody came along and mentioned one or two organizations and I called them.  They didn’t call me back.  One called me back a couple of days later and said they would be willing to help with $200 to $400.  So that was a good start.”

Then he took Kallie to Anaheim Hills Animal Hospital.  The doctors there examined the dog – a small animal who is part miniature Pinscher and part Chihuahua and weighs about six and a half pounds.  “They thought they knew what the problem was [Pyometra],” Tim said, but they were concerned about whether Kallie could be ready to face the needed surgery.

It was late in the day and the veterinarian told Tim that the hospital closed in 20 minutes and suggested that he and Miss Kallie say goodbye to each other.  Fearing the worst, Tim was thinking: “This is my best friend. I can’t let her go like this. She’s my partner in life. There’s got to be something they can do.  Please, let’s not give up!”

The doctor told him: “We’ll give it 24 hours and, if she recovers, we’ll go ahead with the surgery.  But we can’t promise anything.”  The dog was put on an IV about 11 p.m.

The next morning, Tim got a call from the hospital.  The message was positive and he was ecstatic. “She was doing really good and they said they expected to do the surgery sometime that day, if not the next day.  And they said she would likely make it! They said they would check her throughout the day and when they thought she was ready, they would go ahead with the surgery.”

The surgery was performed about 3 p.m. that day.  “They spayed her and cleaned out all the bad stuff, stitched her up and did a beautiful job. I couldn’t have asked for more.”

The hospital steered him to Angel Fund, which approved his application and granted him $500, an amount matched by the practice.

Kallie, he said, weighed barely six pounds when she had the surgery and weighs about have a pound more now.  Tim said that she was ready to play the day he brought her home from the hospital.

“She’s definitely a very special dog,” he said.  “There’s something about her.  I lost my Pitbull in April last year.  If she had left this year, that would have been both of my best friends gone.  Basically, Kallie’s the only family I’ve got left.  I’ve got some cousins but don’t really talk to them too much.”

He is estranged from his sister and has not spoken to his mother in more than two years.

“You guys [Angel Fund] are angels.  You really, truly are.  You are awesome.”

When it was time to pay his bill at Anaheim Hills Hospital, Tim said, “I took all the money I could put together.  But they said, you just need to sign.  It’s all taken care of.  Talk about the Lord blessing me!”

He said that he once had a good job and owned a house, then fell on hard times and had not worked for several years. He recently started a job as a security officer at a shopping center in Orange – and what he hopes will be a fresh start in life with a healthy and happy best friend.

In the fall of 2017, a young Laguna Niguel family had a sick dog on its hands.  Rikku, a shepard mix, had been in the family for some 13 years and was loved by mom and dad and two young children.

Four years ago, Edgard Carnoso Principe and his long-time girlfriend Francine came to America from Brazil with their Boston Terrier, Chloe, to study English.  They hope eventually to become permanent residents.

They live in Newport Beach and Edgard works as a shaper of surfboards. Francine works as a nanny.   They have gotten by on part-time work and limited income.  But last November their resources were tested.

Chloe, who is 10 years old, was having some discomfort, so they took her to Mesa West Pet Hospital not far from their home.  After checking the dog, Edgard said, “the doctor [Lethicia Lepera] said that she found tumors and she needed to test to see if they were real [cancerous].  They were real and she said they needed to be removed as soon as possible.”

The couple faced the possibility of losing their beloved companion because they did not have money for the surgery.  Francine had just lost a job and Edgard was working part time.  Dr. Lepara suggested applying for an Angel Fund grant.

“We applied and we got it,” Edgard said.  “The doctor took off three [mast cell] tumors, one on her belly and two on her legs.”  The Angel Fund grant was for $500, a sum matched by the hospital.

“We took Chloe home after the surgery and she was walking like normal and eating the next day.   It took her two or three weeks to get completely back to normal.”

The dog has not had any additional tumors since then and is “happy and healthy,” Edgard said.  “She’s fine right now.  She is super good.   But she does have something on her neck that we’re going to get checked.  She had a growth that a doctor in Brazil took off a few years ago but she hadn’t had any more until we took her in last November.  She is super healthy, happy and a normal dog.

“If Angel Fund hadn’t helped us, we couldn’t have done the surgery. I don’t make a lot of money and Francine doesn’t work all the time.  We tried to talk to some friends [about helping] but it was a lot of money.”

The couple is grateful to Angel Fund.  “If we didn’t get the money, we couldn’t have gotten the surgery,” Edgard said.  “Without Angel Fund we would probably have had to put Chloe down for sure.  It helped us a lot.”

Tyler Davis and Spritzer, his 13-year-old Toy Fox Terrier, had been through a lot together.  “He was just as spry as he could be,” Tyler said.  But then the seven-pound dog started having problems.

Tyler took him to Fairview Pet Hospital in Costa Mesa.  Dr. Hongwon Kang told him that he believed Spritzer had a congenital condition that is common in the breed.  He said that he needed an x-ray to confirm the diagnosis.

But Tyler, who recently had been homeless, did not have the money to pay the bill.  The doctor suggested that Angel Fund could help.  Tyler applied but it was about three weeks before he received the grant.  In the meantime, Spritzer’s condition worsened.

Tyler did research online and knew what medications were recommended for treatment.  The condition includes a collapsed trachea and an enlarged heart.  “It makes it increasingly hard for the dog to breath,” Tyler said. But Dr. Kang did not want to prescribe the drugs, he said, until he could take x-rays to confirm the condition.

When Tyler was informed that his grant had been approved, he was ecstatic.  He took Spritzer to the hospital and x-rays were taken.  Tyler obtained the medications and began giving them to his dog.

“Angel Fund was a life-saver but the x-rays showed that Spritzer’s enlarged heart was really big and was already pushing his trachea,” Tyler said.  “He would stand up and then he would fall over because he would black out.  Two weeks earlier, he was chasing squirrels.  He went from that to falling over.  It killed me.”e H

It had become increasingly clear that Spritzer was nearing the end of his life.  “I watched for a couple of weeks and I just couldn’t take it. Finally, my two sons came over and got me and Spritzer and took us to the vet.  Spritzer was staring into my eyes and I was bawling, man!”

It was about a month after the dog had begun taking the medications that he was put down.

Tyler had a good job as a successful real estate agent but he plunged into homelessness after a real estate deal went sour during the Great Recession of 2007-08 that was caused by subprime mortgages and a housing bubble.  He had two young sons, now both financially successful at ages 24 and 22.  The family was helped by the Illumination Foundation, an Orange County nonprofit that provides aid to those without shelter.   And they lived for a time in a “big storage unit” that Tyler made into a temporary home.

“The homeless thing is like a black hole, Tyler said.  “You’re almost climbing out and then the thread breaks and you go all the way back down to the bottom.  I had a resume as long as my arm but nobody would hire me.  I raised my two boys by myself.”

Tyler lived in his car for a time and later was able to buy a recreational vehicle, that is still his home.  He also went back to school and earned a graphic arts degree.  He believes that triggered his recovery from homelessness. While in school, he did a graphic picture of Spritzer on his computer.

In 2009, he started repairing auto windshields.  The small business “was just keeping me alive for a while” but now is doing well.  “It’s been pretty good these last six months,” he said. “I get a lot of calls for window replacement, which I don’t do, but I’m thinking about expanding my business to include that.  I could go do a workshop or hire somebody who knows how to do it.”

Tyler said that he didn’t want to get another dog after Spritzer died.  “But now we’ve got Peanut, a small white Chihuahua.  “He’s a menace, 24/7. He’s about the same size and almost looks like Spritzer.”

He also is setting up a nonprofit he is calling Life Rebuilders to help the homeless by giving them shoes.