Stories of the Dog-Human Bond
September 2026 | Volume 7
A Dog, a Hospital and a Twist of Fate
By Jessica Robinson
Before Saffy could start her therapy dog job, one piece of paperwork was needed.
Saffy knows exactly where to go.
She walks step-in-step with her owner/handler Dave Humeston through the doors of Phelps Hospital in Sleepy Hollow, New York. They head toward the Cancer Infusion Unit, her Good Dog Foundation bandana tied neatly around her neck.
Faces turn. Nurses and patients recognize her. She is hard to miss.
As a Rhodesian Ridgeback, Saffy is tall and athletic, with the distinctive ridged back and dignified bearing of her breed.
But beside a patient, her size seems to disappear. She settles calmly beside a chair as a hand reaches down to pat her.
Humeston does the talking. He chats with patients. Chats with nurses. Sometimes there is laughter. Sometimes there is a quiet conversation that seems to go nowhere and everywhere at once.
Humeston, for all his easy chatter, understands something more about what these patients are going through that most visitors ever could. He’s a cancer patient too.
Meanwhile Saffy does what she came to do: offer the uncomplicated comfort of a dog who doesn’t need to know what brought you there.
Humeston and Saffy are a specially trained Good Dog Foundation therapy team, making their rounds through the Cancer Infusion Unit. At least, that’s how it looks.
But Humeston understands what these patients are going through in a way most visitors never could. He’s a cancer patient, too. Just not at Phelps. His treatment takes place a few miles away, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Westchester.
A Routine Clearance
The connection between Humeston, Saffy and Phelps began in 2019, when the two were preparing to start their therapy work there. Before they could begin, Phelps required Humeston to complete a medical clearance—a routine requirement that would prove anything but routine.
Saffy and Dave
“I went to my doctor for antibody verification and a few vaccinations. While there, I decided to do my annual check-up and blood work. The results showed a slight white cell deficit, which then led my doctor to do more tests.”
Those tests revealed a problem serious enough that his doctor pressed further.
Saffy with Dave's Father
On Christmas Eve of 2019, Humeston became a patient at Memorial Sloan Kettering Westchester with a diagnosis of mantle cell lymphoma — a rare and aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Doctors suspected the cancer was likely connected to the time he had spent at Ground Zero after September 11, where he had worked in search and rescue.
“It was a shock,” Humeston admits. But shock, for him, doesn’t look like most people imagine.
“I’m a Ground Zero veteran,” explains Humeston. “I was there shortly after it happened. I’m a first responder. Because of my nature and my life as a cop, I don’t fear too much.”
There wasn’t much time to dwell on the diagnosis anyway. Mantle cell lymphoma moves fast, and treatment began almost immediately.
The Fight
What followed was nearly a year that would test even a first responder’s nerves.
Humeston endured round after round of chemotherapy designed to hunt down cancer cells hiding in his bone marrow. But mantle cell lymphoma doesn’t go quietly. Eventually, doctors escalated to the most brutal weapon in their arsenal: a stem cell transplant, performed in Sloan Kettering’s Manhattan location.
“That’s a really, really tough experience,” Humeston says, with the understatement of a man who has genuinely seen worse. “They try to kill you. Then they put a new immune system in you.”
It’s a fair summary of what a stem cell transplant actually does — obliterate a patient’s compromised immune system with high-dose chemotherapy, then rebuild it from donated stem cells, one of the most physically punishing treatments in modern medicine. Through the infusions, the transplant and the days when simply standing up took everything he had, Saffy stayed close, attuned to him in the wordless way dogs are tuned into the people they love.
The Part No One Expected
On the days Humeston wasn’t in treatment himself, he wanted Saffy to do the therapy work they’d trained for — even while he was still undergoing chemotherapy.
People thought he was crazy. Here he was, fighting his own cancer, yet he wanted to walk into a room full of other cancer patients.
“I knew just what those patients were feeling and how much it meant to have a sweet dog offering comfort during the most uncomfortable of times, and how lucky I am to have Saffy with me all the time.”
“I could look at someone getting infused and know exactly what they were feeling,” Humeston says. The fear. The boredom. The strange loneliness of it, even in a room full of people.”
Patients didn’t always know Humeston had cancer too. But some did, and for those who found out, something shifted — the visit stopped being just about the dog and became something closer to solidarity…a quiet nod between two people fighting the same kind of war on different fronts.
Remission
In October of 2020, after chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant, and more infusion chairs than he can probably count, Humeston got the word every cancer patient is fighting to hear: remission.
“Therapy dog work may have saved my life,” he says. “Saffy gave me a job to do. And that job happened to be helping people exactly like me.”
These days Humeston and Saffy continue their volunteer work in hospitals. Since 2024 they have made weekly visits to Northern Dutchess Hospital in Rhinebeck, New York.
Saffy remains the obvious attraction. Now that Humeston is in remission, he’s just the guy holding the leash.
Jessica and Henry
Jessica Robinson
Jessica Robinson is producer, director, writer, and former head of Robinson Creative Services, a direct response marketing agency
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