First, You Should Know: I'm One of You

I'm a Gen X, neurodivergent (ADHD) woman who has spent over 50 years being told she's too much.

Too intense. Too sensitive. Too obsessed with things that "normal" people apparently have the luxury of not caring about.

I grew up before anyone had language for brains like mine. So I just assumed I was broken. Malfunctioning. A factory defect they forgot to recall.

And then I got dogs.

Dogs never got the memo that I was too much. They did not care that I felt everything at a volume that would make most people cover their ears and back slowly out of the room. They did not care that I was doing deep research on something at 2am that no one asked me to research. They just looked at me like I was exactly right. Exactly enough. Exactly who they wanted.

If you're here, you already know what I'm talking about.

You love your dog with the kind of feral, slightly unhinged devotion that makes other people visibly uncomfortable at parties. You feel everything so deeply you're tired before you even get out of bed. Your dog is not a pet. Your dog is a nervous system regulation system, a reason to function, a reason to not completely come apart at the seams on a Tuesday.

This brand exists because of that love.

The kind of love that makes you realize your dog is not replaceable. Not interchangeable. Not "just a dog." The kind of love that, when it gets ripped away without warning, changes you in ways you do not fully understand until you're standing in a vet's office being told there is nothing left to do.

And because six days after I found a golf ball-sized lump on my dog Gideon's neck, he was gone.

Six days. I want you to sit with that for a second. By the time I found it and took him to the vet, we were already out of time. That is how fast lymphoma moves. That is why I will never stop talking about monthly checks.

Sixty-seven days after losing Gideon, I adopted Zeke. A deaf rescue Boxer who became, without exaggeration, my reason to keep breathing. A year later I found a tiny lump on him. Pea-sized. Nothing like Gideon's. Most people would have waited to see if it grew.

I did not wait.

That decision has saved his life more than once. Every suspicious growth I have found has been removed immediately. Surgery alone has been curative every single time because I found them small, when they were still manageable. Zeke was about three years old when we found his first mast cell tumor. Young dogs get cancer too. They just do not get press.

Not knowing cost me Gideon. Knowing and refusing to wait has kept Zeke alive.

Since 2021, I have sent over 1,300 free canine cancer awareness magnets to dog people all over the world. Not because anyone asked me to. Because I cannot unknow what I know, and I refuse to let other people lose their dog the way I lost mine if I can do one single thing about it.

So if you're here because your dog is your person. If you're here because you have been told your whole life that you love too hard and feel too much. If you're here because you just want to be somewhere that finally, finally gets it:

You're home.

Welcome to the squad.

💗 Patty, Zeke & Zella