Help Beach Student Melodie Lee Get a Seizure Response Dog

Students and teachers at know Melodie Lee as a cute, lively third grader.

Students and faculty at know Melodie's mother, Christelle Hutin Lee, as a teacher of French and Spanish in the World Languages Department.

What they may not know is that Melodie, 8, suffers from epilepsy so severe that it can, at times, be life-threatening. She frequently experiences what is called status epilepticus, a non-stop seizure. During her last two seizures she has stopped breathing.

One of Hutin Lee's biggest worries is a nocturnal seizure while Melodie and family members are asleep, which could be fatal. To protect her daughter, Hutin Lee is raising funds to obtain a trained seizure response dog that could alert the family if Melodie has a nighttime seizure.

Melodie's family will get the dog at the beginning of summer through the Great Plains Assistance Dogs Foundation Inc. (Service Dogs for America) in North Dakota, which trains dogs to alert others to a seizure event. The cost for the dog, family training and travel is about $5,000, a stretch on a teacher's salary.

Piedmont Patch learned about Melodie's need recently through a mention in the newsletter and got in touch with Hutin Lee. She told us that fundraising has brought in a little over $1,500 so far and that she hopes to raise the full amount by June.

If you can help, there are two ways to donate. To contribute using PayPal, visit Hutin Lee's FundRazr page on Facebook. Or you can give a check directly to Hutin Lee, made payable to "Service Dogs for America" and postdated to June 1, 2012 (when the family will travel to North Dakota to get the dog).

You can learn more about Melodie's need for a seizure response dog on her Facebook page and more about how the dogs are trained here.