MANKATO — Steve Murphy has a new best friend.

The Mankato man traveled to Texas last summer to meet Nyla with some trepidation. Although he was meeting her for the first time, he was expecting she would return to Mankato with him, and move into his apartment.

Nyla is a yellow Labrador retriever who serves Murphy as his “diabetes alert dog.” She is trained to tell Murphy when his blood sugar, or blood glucose goes low, before it dips to dangerous levels.

“I’ve had diabetes since I was 24, and I’m 57 now,” Murphy said. As often happens, the longer a person lives with diabetes, the more desensitized they become to the symptoms that warn of low blood sugar.

A normal blood sugar in a non-diabetic person is in the range of 70 to 130, according to the American Diabetes Association. Before Nyla, Murphy would sometimes find his level in the teens. “I fractured my skull twice on the kitchen floor,” he said about passing out from being too low.

Now Nyla alerts Murphy, usually when his levels are between 70 and 50, so he can take action to get his levels back into the normal range. She usually alerts him by licking his face, an action that is hard to ignore.

Brenda Murphy is Steve’s oldest child. She lives in East Bethel, and was searching for some way to make her father safer. “I checked with the American Diabetes Association, and they told me about these dogs,” she said.

That’s when she came across Beth Eden Kennels in Canyon, Texas. “This just seemed like a perfect solution.” Unfortunately, insurance won’t cover the cost of a diabetes alert dog, so Brenda and her four siblings began saving to cover the $7,500 expense.

“Nyla has been worth it,” Brenda said.

Brenda recalls the 11:30 p.m. phone call she received June 13. Her father had been in Texas two days, and had Nyla with him at the motel he was staying in. Growing teary-eyed, Brenda recalls her dad saying, “‘You’re never going to believe this, but Nyla just woke me up to tell me I’m low!’ It was my birthday, and it was the best birthday present I could have ever had.”

Ann Pulliam owns Beth Eden Kennels. She says for the relationship between dog and person to work, the person has to believe in things they can’t see. “If they don’t believe it is going to work, it won’t.”

Pulliam said maybe when a person has low blood sugar, they emit an acidic smell. “But I don’t really know, and the dogs aren’t talking.”

First the dogs are trained in basic obedience, she said. “They have to sit, stay, and heel when they are told to.” Then, the dogs are taken into restaurants, stores, on busy streets and must still obey their commands. She then asks the person who will be getting the dog to send socks and perhaps a shirt they are wearing during a low blood sugar, or hypoglycemic episode. In the next stage, the person goes to Beth Eden Kennels in Canyon for a week to meet the dog and learn how to work with him or her.

It was during that week of training that Nyla first alerted Murphy to his low blood sugar. He hadn’t been too sure of getting a dog when Brenda first suggested it, he said. “I couldn’t take care of myself then, and I didn’t know how I would take care of a dog.” Since their first day together, Murphy became a true believer.

Since then, she has alerted him of low blood sugars every day. Pulliam said the dogs aren’t trained to alert to high blood sugar levels, as those levels are dangerous over the long term, though not so much in the short term. But somehow, they seem to sense them, too.

Although all the dogs are trained on the scent of the person they will be servicing, they seem to know when others are having blood sugar problems, also, Pulliam said.

In fact, Murphy was heading home from Texas with Nyla when a man came and sat in a chair near him at the airport. Nyla, he said, had been sleeping at his feet. When the man sat down, Nyla jumped on the chair between then, and began poking her nose against his chest. “I asked him if he was a diabetic, and he said, ‘Yes, why?’ I told him Nyla was telling him his blood sugar was high, and he said he was always high.”

Nyla goes everywhere with Murphy now, including to the grocery store, restaurants and the pharmacy. “Everyone loves her,” he said, “and she’s my best buddy.”