Courtney McGrailRachel Beard talks to scientist Claire Guest about her special relationship with dogs
“Often when people say, ‘wow, you did a fantastic thing’ and ‘isn’t it marvellous what’s going on?’, I have to say, ‘it has had marvellous results and I’m very proud of that, but it was the love of dogs and people around me that enabled me to do these things,” says Claire Guest, author of the book Daisy’s Gift: The Remarkable Cancer-detecting Dog who Saved my Life. “Certainly not something I’ve achieved on my own.”
But Claire Guest has achieved quite a lot in her lifetime, with and without the help of others. She co-founded Medical Detection Dogs, an organisation that trains dogs to detect human diseases, including cancer.
“Clearly, they’ve got this incredible sense of smell,” Claire says of the dogs in her organisation. “They can go down to one part in a trillion. So they can tell us about things in our environment that we are only vaguely aware of.”
In addition to detecting cancer, Claire and her co-workers at Medical Detection Dogs also train assistance dogs. Like guide dogs, they live with their owners and alert them of serious medical conditions that they may not be aware of.
Bond
“Just to see the bond and the relationship that these dogs and people have, it brings tears to your eyes and that’s something when you’ve been working with dogs for 30 years, you see the relationship, you see the dog’s ability to warn the person of something that would be absolutely horrible for that person,” Claire says. “A situation where they’ll be collapsing, in an ambulance, and the dog will just very calmly, very gently, just go up, warn them and enable the person to take action.”
Claire and her team are currently working on training dogs to detect malaria and Parkinson’s disease along with their ongoing work training dogs to detect cancer.
Claire’s book tells the story of her personal journey and her relationship with dogs – a relationship that saved her life when Daisy sniffed out breast cancer on Claire herself, an event that still drives Claire in her research with Medical Detection Dogs.
“But having Daisy warning me and saving my life was the turning point that made me think, ‘hang on, I’ve had my life saved here, how many other people out there are losing friends, relatives, partners, children daily because of poor diagnosis?’” Claire says.
The book, which was released today, outlines Claire’s struggles with depression, a form of face-blindness, a nasty divorce and her struggle with breast cancer, personal experiences that Claire is anxious about sharing.
“I’m quite nervous, because you just never know,” Claire says. “It’s very close to me.”
Claire’s bout with depression had an especially large impact on her life, forcing her to accept help from others despite her independent nature.
“I think before I had depression, as a younger person, you tend to believe that it’s all about you making a difference personally and you being the best of all and all these things about me,” Claire says. “Then going through a process of depression, when you get to the lowest point in your life, you realise that it’s about rebuilding it in terms of what we can do together. It’s much more about understanding the joy in doing things together.”
Another obstacle Claire has had to overcome is face-blindness, or prosopagnosia, a condition that makes it difficult for her to recognise faces.
Privileged
“It makes the world a bit worrying because one, you don’t want to insult people, and two, you don’t want to speak to somebody you know and then for it turn out to be a friendly stranger,” she says. “But I never had that feeling with dogs. I’ve always had this feeling, and I feel very privileged to have it, I genuinely do, when I look at a dog, I can sort of tell what it was saying to me.”
One important aspect of her life that isn’t mentioned in the book is Claire’s Irish roots. Her family were Irish Catholics, and though it was one in one of the earlier drafts of the book, it was taken out.
“We’re very proud of our Irish roots,” she says.
Although she’s not a practising Catholic anymore, Claire says her spirituality is still an important part of her life.
“I’m less orthodox in any particular way of showing that, but I went to school with Irish nuns. I obviously went to First Communion,” she says. “I was brought up quite a strict Catholic, actually, until I became an adult and went to university, and I’ve become more spiritual in my beliefs. But it stays with you.”
Claire feels that she has come a long way with Medical Detection Dogs and even though she has struggled to have her work recognised as legitimate science, she feels she’s overcome most of that prejudice in the medical community.
“I, just last week, had a fantastic surprise,” Claire says. “I won the CBI First Women Award for Science and Technology, and I was absolutely amazed. We come from a time when we were not considered scientists. I was considered the mad dog lady.”
Despite all she’s accomplished, Claire is always looking to the future.
“I think some of the work we’re involved in now, we’re just starting to know what this relationship is going to produce in the future,” she says. “So I like to think that the remaining part of my life, there’ll be even more that we’ll discover, even more that we’ll learn.”
Claire Guest’s new book Daisy’s Gift: The Remarkable cancer-detecting Dog who Saved my Life is published by Virgin Books and is available on sale now.