My dog knew I had cancer before I did — then helped me through chemo: ‘He was a greater purpose for me’

A young woman’s dog was the first to detect her deadly breast cancer.

In June 2023, Breanna Bortner, then 30, noticed her cockapoo Mochi became fixated on her right breast; sniffing, pawing and burrowing into the area.

Stranger still, her sister-in-law’s cockapoo Gunner exhibited the same behavior.

“It was very odd,” Bortner told DailyMail.com.  

In the previous year, Bortner had felt increasingly fatigued. While scratching a mosquito bite around her breasts, she noticed a lump. Having heard anecdotal stories of dogs detecting their owner’s cancer by scent alone, she was disquieted by the attention.

Cockapoos are a mix between a poodle and a cocker spaniel, two breeds known for their acute intelligence and keen sense of smell.

Bortner was already planning to get tested, but Mochi’s insistence was the canine catalyst for seeking medical care.

Within a few days, she was diagnosed with stage 2B triple-negative invasive ductal carcinoma.

Triple-negative is a more aggressive type of breast cancer that does not have any of the three common “receptors” in the cells, which means it doesn’t respond to the hormonal therapies that are typically used to fight the disease. 

Bortner, who runs the blog Brave Beautiful Boobies, recalled that despite having a clean bill of health from a breast exam three months earlier, the mass in her breast was already an inch and a half.

“That’s how fast and aggressive this triple-negative breast cancer is. It went from non-feel-able, nondetectable to a physical lump within three months,” she said.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer among US women after skin cancer. About 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. 

Though breast cancer starts in a localized part of the breast tissue, it can spread to other areas of the body, significantly decreasing rates of survival.

Survival rates among breast cancer patients whose cancer is detected before it spreads are high, between 86% and 89%. Yet if the cancer is detected after the cancer cells have migrated, that number drops to 31%.

Invasive ductal carcinoma, which forms in the milk ducts, accounts for about 80% of all breast cancer cases.

Bortner, who has undergone 16 rounds of chemotherapy and a double mastectomy since her diagnosis, says Mochi’s intervention led to her early diagnosis and quite possibly saved her life.

“We really underestimate how smart [dogs] are just because they don’t talk and they can’t communicate to us, but their actions obviously show us the things that they’re tuning into or are aware of.”

A 2019 study suggested that blood-sniffing dogs may become the latest frontier in cancer detection. Thanks to their unfathomably keen sense of smell — which is 10,000 times more accurate than a human’s — dogs in the lab were able to pick-out blood samples from cancer patients with 97% accuracy.

“Previous studies leveraging canines in the cancer detection space have yielded accuracy rates of up to 99%,” Heather Junqueira, lead researcher of the study, told The Post. She added that dogs may also be able to detect cancer earlier than other traditional exams.

“We’ve seen these dogs detect precancerous cells, meaning those at stage 0-1.”

Meanwhile, a 2006 study showed that dogs were able to differentiate between the breaths of women with breast cancer and those without the disease with roughly 90% accuracy.

More recently, London’s Medical Detection Dogs were able to reliably sniff out prostate cancer via urine samples 93% of the time in a 2015 study of 3,000 patients. Canines have also been taught to find cervical, colorectal, lung, stomach, liver, ovarian and thyroid cancers — in many cases far sooner than traditional laboratory tests ever could.

Mochi not only helped detect Bortner’s cancer, he saw her through the emotional gauntlet of treatment.

“I was crying all the time and he did not like that. He was very concerned about me. He really turned into my healing buddy. He was a greater purpose for me.”

Last spring, with Mochi by her side, Bortner was declared cancer-free.

“It’s pretty cool to see it come full circle and for him to be there from the time I found the lump all the way through finding out I was cancer-free,” she said.

Following her recovery, she spent more time away from the house, triggering separation anxiety in Mochi.

“He spent so much time with me here. That’s just kind of been the status quo. So now when I leave the house or he’s home alone, he’s been getting into the trash can and showing some behaviors that are quite new.”

Mochi and Bortner are working with a trainer to address his anxiety.

Bortner now has scans every three months to make sure her cancer hasn’t returned. While she is grateful to the doctors and nurses who aided her in her journey to recovery, she credits Mochi for his life-saving vigilance.

And it’s not just dogs, but smart rings that may be able to detect cancer. A woman recently revealed on TikTok that her Oura ring, which resembles a wedding band and tracks various health metrics, detected her cancer symptoms before she was diagnosed with lymphoma.

In the weeks before her diagnosis, the Oura ring tracked her unusually high body temperatures. A month after the symptoms started popping up on her app, she discovered a mass, describing it as “textbook presentation of lymphoma.”