Daines and Amanda Tanner’s dog jumped onto their bed a few months ago and pawed their bodies while they were trying to sleep. It was around 5:30 a.m. on a Saturday, the one day the couple hoped to sleep in each week. Amanda had never seen Axel, their 1-year-old border collie, so active that early. They guessed he needed to be let outside, so Daines walked him downstairs.

However, when Daines opened the door to their backyard, Axel wouldn’t go outside. Instead, he rushed toward Amanda’s 17-year-old son’s room downstairs and started clawing at the door. Inside, Gabriel Silva was already awake. Minutes earlier, he was walking in the living room when he lost his balance and fell. Gabriel didn’t know why he was feeling poorly, so he returned to his room and got back in bed. Then, he heard Axel at his door and Daines downstairs.

Gabriel followed Axel into the living room, where he started explaining his symptoms to Daines: he was struggling to walk, the right side of his body was numb, and his vision was magnified. However, Daines could barely understand Gabriel because his speech was slurred. Daines drove Gabriel to an emergency room, where doctors determined he was having a stroke. The “Today” show reported that Gabriel has since regained his ability to speak, walk and move his right arm. Sabih Effendi, a neurosurgeon who treated Gabriel, said he might have never recovered if Axel didn’t wake up the family that morning.

Effendi told The Washington Post, “Without that early notification of him getting to the hospital, you really would have had really permanent deficits that would have made him really nonfunctional and unable to live life.” Gabriel plays goalkeeper for his high school’s soccer team and said there weren’t any warning signs before the stroke. Before the incident, he went to school and soccer practice before dressing in a black bow tie and jacket for his senior year pictures. He had a headache, but it went away while he spent the night playing computer games.

According to Gabriel, he went to bed around midnight but woke up around 5 a.m. with a numb right arm. He doesn’t remember why he left his room, but Gabriel said he lost his balance and fell on the tile as he walked into the living room. He said he couldn’t move, and everything around him looked larger than usual. He also saw Axel, whom the family adopted in July 2022.

A blood vessel connected to Gabriel’s brain had torn, Effendi said, and the tear was preventing blood from flowing to that part of his brain. While about 795,000 people in the United States suffer strokes each year, Effendi said, only between 10 and 20 percent of those incidents occur in people under age 30. Amanda, who thought healthy teenagers couldn’t have strokes, said she spent the rest of that day imagining life going forward. She thought she might have to quit her accounting job and learn how to take care of her son.

However, Gabriel soon started physical, occupational and speech therapy and quickly progressed. He regained his ability to walk three days after he was admitted to the hospital. Gabriel is being home-schooled for now but hopes to return to high school by the time soccer season starts in December.

Next year, he intends to study engineering in college. Effendi said Axel alerting his owners is one of the main reasons Gabriel’s goals are possible. He said, “It’s amazing how adamant a dog was knowing something’s going on.”