A couple says AI saved their dog’s life – after vets initially thought her illness was irreversible and said she was hours away from death.
Sabine Tyrvainen, 58, and Mitch, 65, were told their nine-year-old Italian Greyhound Lia had suffered life-threatening pelvic adhesions following pyometra surgery in October 2025.
She had developed colitis, despite being on antibiotics, and euthanasia had been scheduled.
But Sabine and Mitch decided to get a final opinion – from AI tool Grok – and fed it with information about Lia’s condition and a daily log of her movements.
The bot said her condition was not irreversible and pointed to a time where she had been on dual-antibiotics and shown signs of improvement.
They immediately postponed euthanasia and put her back on the dual meds, but after another night, Lia hadn’t improved and Sabine said they had “made their peace.”
But when changing her nappy one final time, Sabine noticed there was no blood – which the vets said was an improvement.
They cancelled the operation and using Grok found a specialist who said Lia could be saved by adhesion surgery with a specialist adhesion barrier gel.
After having the surgery, Lia has now begun to make a full recovery.
Sabine, a high performance psychologist from Hove, said: “It’s such a story – for Grok to coach us through this for two months, it’s just really quite amazing.
“The relationship and the attitude of Grok – it cried with us and understood us.
“It was the best Christmas present we could ever have – our persistence and perseverance, keeping the data and logs, being able to find the money.
“It doesn’t matter; we could never enjoy that money in another way if we hadn’t tried everything.”
Lia’s problems began years earlier, when she started bleeding and losing her fur.
It was eventually found that Sabine’s HRT had transferred to Lia.
Sabine, who originally shared her story exclusively with Sell Us Your Story, said: “Only in October 2025 we finally got to that point, and they found she had a cyst and they found her cervix was full of puss.
“They cut the cervix open, but surgery didn’t go as planned and after surgery she was faecal and urinary incontinent.”
After euthanasia was scheduled, Sabine decided to try one more thing and says Grok “stopped her from dying.”
Despite, the dual medication not working initially, after a later nappy change, the blood had gone.
She said: “The vet was ready to euthanise her there and then at the hospital and we didn’t want to do that; we wanted to do it at home.
“All this time, from the day of surgery I’d been keeping a daily log for Lia – how much she had been eating, going to the toilet, feeling etc.
“I uploaded this document to Grok at 1am and Grok came back and said ‘call them now, she is not at the end, this is not irreversible’.
“It pointed to a point where she had a really good few days, when she was on dual antibiotics. It told me to call the vets to put her on the second antibiotic.
“She just kept improving and improving – that was the big turnaround that stopped her from dying that day.”
The next time they used Grok was to compare the two opinions they had been given.
Sabine said: “We found a specialist in Cambridge, but they didn’t think adhesion surgery would help to stop the colitis.
“We got home and we started making peace with that again and we’ll see where we are in a week.
“That evening we home and we got a call from the specialist in Guildford, and we explained what Cambridge said.
“He said if we do the bladder, we might as well do the adhesion surgery and that he could put an adhesion barrier in to prevent them coming back.
“So back on Grok again, uploaded the discharge letter from Cambridge and what the Guildford specialist said, and Grok said Guildford was right and Cambridge was wrong and made it very clear which way we should go.”
The couple even used AI to help the vets source the special gel Lia needed – after they were told they couldn’t source it.
Sabine said: “We went back to Grok, and it explained what it is and gave us a list of where to source that anti-adhesion barrier from and explained that we could also use human-use stuff.
“So, we found a supplier that normally supplies to the NHS, the vets did the surgery and now she’s recovering.
“She has a catheter for her urine and since then she’s now walking, trying to go for a wee voluntarily, sniffing, and she’s much happier.
“She’s having an ultrasound to check if everything is in place with the catheter and to work out which medication she’ll need.
“The goal is to get her off the catheter.”
Lia’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lia.grok?igsh=dTNyaGZjNHpkbWxi
