A special boy, A special dog

First the boy rescued the dog.

Now the dog rescues the boy.

If it weren’t for each other, they might not be alive today.

The story began on a spring day two years ago.

Dominic Wiederin, then 17, was driving his white 1992 Cadillac down a Nebraska highway when he spotted what looked like a black dog wandering woefully beside the road. Dominic stopped the car.

The dog’s tail lopped at an odd angle. He was gaunt from hunger. Cysts surrounded his eyes. His coat was actually red but was coated with black grime. His underbelly was raw from sleeping rough. He had no tags. No collar.

Dominic pushed open the passenger door.

“Come here, buddy,” he called.

The dog jumped in like it was his car. He lay down on the seat next to Dominic, like they already belonged to each other.

Dominic drove toward home. The abandoned dog with nothing but troubles in the world reminded him of a biblical figure: Job, the poster boy for remaining faithful in the face of misery.

Dominic named the dog with a variation on the spelling: Jobe.

“Job remained loyal,” Dominic said. “Jobe’s been through tough times. So why not?”

The boy had no idea how steadfast a friend the mangy creature would become. He headed home to talk his parents, Teresa and Mark Wiederin, into letting him keep the dog.

It was not an easy sell.

The family’s northwest Omaha home already was bustling with six children, all but one younger than Dominic, and a pint-size canine dictator named Gunther. The little white Maltese-Papillon alpha dog believes he runs the house. He’s not afraid to bite bigger dogs to show them who’s boss.

Dominic was busy, too. He was a junior at Roncalli High School. He played football. He had a construction job.

A bath and a veterinarian’s checkup revealed that Jobe is a Hungarian Vizsla, a popular hunting breed. He’s about 8 years old. He stands 2 foot tall at his shoulders. He’s sleek at 63 pounds.

Malnourished, he weighed 52 pounds when he was rescued.

“This dog had a rough life,” veterinarian Dr. W.C. Lofton said. “Whether it was by someone, or by other animals or automobiles — he had a rough start.”

Lofton fixed all the problems he could fix. Jobe had a broken tail. Scars marked old injuries on his ribs, back and scrotum. The cysts around his eyes had been growing for a long time. He had tapeworms.

“He’s a good boy,” Dominic told his parents.

“We don’t know where he came from,” his mother worried. “We don’t really know about him.”

But she and her husband agreed to give it a try, at least until they found out if someone else would claim Jobe.

No one else did.

But he claimed the Wiederins.

“After a couple weeks, we just all fell in love with him,” Teresa said.

Jobe is friendly. He doesn’t run after squirrels. He’s good with the kids. He puts up with Gunther’s nips. He rarely barks. He chases sticks and chews them to slivers. He lies quietly while Dominic pulls the slivers from his gums.

Mostly, Jobe sticks to Dominic.

“I call him Velcro,” Teresa said.

So what if the new dog wore out one-third of the backyard grass by pacing whenever Dominic is away? And the family can live with Jobe’s one truly bad habit: swallowing socks, then throwing them up or defecating them out.

He and Dominic became nearly inseparable. They’d go anywhere, do anything together.

They even built a limestone retaining wall together. Dominic loaded the stones on a sled in the front yard, harnessed Jobe to the sled and led him to the backyard. “He’s about the best dog I’ve ever had,” Dominic said.

Jobe had a home.

About six months after finding Jobe, Dominic went out to eat barbecue with other Roncalli football players. Later, he swelled up and turned as red as a lobster. It felt like something was stuck in his throat.

His parents rushed him to the hospital.

Doctors diagnosed him with severe allergies to food and other substances. Though a younger brother has food allergies, Dominic had never previously displayed them.

That was just the beginning. Over the past year and a half, Dominic has been to the hospital about 100 times with severe allergic reactions. They threaten his ability to breathe. Often he’s unable to speak.

The episodes messed up his senior year at Roncalli. Now 19, Dominic is a senior at Omaha Central High.

Through medical tests and trial and error, Dominic has been diagnosed with allergies to paprika, peanuts, walnuts, tomatoes, rice, corn, agricultural pesticides and cats, among other things.

His sensitivity and the strength of the reactions have grown. Shaking hands with a cat owner can land him in the intensive-care unit.

He and his parents don’t know what caused the allergies to surface. They know it’s not Jobe.

They take numerous measures to counter the allergies, beginning with controlling his diet. They always have at hand EpiPens, emergency shots of epinephrine that can counter an allergic reaction. The whole family is trained to use them.

Some of the scariest attacks are secondary reactions. They come after Dominic has been released from the hospital after treatment for an attack. As the medicine wears off, his body reacts again. It can happen in the middle of the night, with everyone asleep.

One November night in 2007, Dominic had come home from a hospital stay. He was sleeping on a couch in the home’s main level instead of his basement bedroom, to be closer to his parents’ room.

In the wee hours came a howling from the living room. It was Jobe.

Teresa and Mark thought someone was breaking into the house. They ran to Dominic.

He frantically motioned to his face with both hands. He was swollen and half out of it.

They rushed him to the hospital.

“The first time Jobe saved him, we thought, ‘OK, that was kind of fluky,’” Teresa said.

Then it happened again.

In the middle of the night in November 2008, Jobe rousted the entire family with howling. Teresa and Mark ran to find Dominic in respiratory distress.

Then it happened again, just last week.

Dominic had fallen asleep Sunday night in a recliner after returning home from yet another hospital stay. He had unknowingly visited a home that has cats.

About 3 a.m. Monday, Jobe began to bark.

“He was howling and howling,” Teresa said. “He came running down the hall like there was a fire. I got up and met him at the (bedroom) door. I said, ‘What’s wrong, buddy?’”

Jobe turned around and ran barking down the hallway to Dominic, with Teresa on his heels.

This time, Dominic could speak.

“I can’t breathe,” he told his mother.

They raced him to the hospital again. He was released Wednesday afternoon.

“When he comes home from the hospital and he’s so tired and weak from all the medicines, Jobe is right there for him,” Teresa said. “Dom can’t do a lot of things teenagers do, but he tells me ‘I’m not lonely. I’ve got Jobe.’”

Dominic was still puffy Thursday afternoon as he and his mother told the story in the family’s backyard.

“You know how a coyote howls at the moon?” Dominic said. “He howls like that. He’ll howl until somebody comes.”

“My husband says he’s like a Lassie dog,” Teresa said.

They suspect Jobe notices changes in Dominic’s breathing. Maybe the dog picks up on Dominic’s emotional distress.

“He obviously connects so well with Dom that he senses trouble, fear, whatever,” Teresa said.

There are working dogs specially trained to smell food allergy threats, such as peanuts, and keep their owners from eating them. They can cost upward of $10,000.

“Jobe doesn’t sniff out the danger,” Teresa said. “But he knows when something’s wrong and calls for help. We’re so blessed to have Jobe just fall into our laps and love our son as much as we do and help protect him. ...

“Dom saved him. And he saved Dom.”

Contact the writer:

444-1057, christopher.burbach@owh.com