Victoria woman credits wiener dog named 'Coco Bean' with her cancer diagnosis

Victoria, B.C. -

When Shannon Ferguson first opened her thrift store, the first dog through the door was a dachshund who lived down the road.

“She’s so beautiful.” Shannon says she connected instantly with the canine called Coco Bean the Naughty Sausage.

She also formed a fast friendship with the dog’s owner, Jimmy Lapointe.

“We just clicked,” Jimmy says.

“It was like we’d known each other forever,” Shannon says. “It was so easy.”

Unlike how other things were starting to feel so effortful. “I was focusing on survival,” Shannon says.

She was fighting through constant exhaustion to focus on her new business, enduring pain in her body to focus on her children, and dismissing the discovery of a physical change to focus on getting ready to go out that night.

“I noticed a dent on the underside of my left breast,” Shannon says.

But Shannon compartmentalized any concern and accepted an invitation from Jimmy and his wife, Ingrid, to have dinner at Coco Bean’s home for the first time

“I thought just push through,” Shannon says. “And go spend time with these amazing people you want to get to know more.”

When Shannon arrived at their house, Coco Bean greeted her enthusiastically, and then refused to leave her side while having dinner and playing board games.

“This [attention] was on another level.” Jimmy says he’d never seen his dog act this way.

It was so intense, and so unprecedented, they took pictures of the pup staring intently beside Shannon.

“It was more than affection,” Jimmy says. “It looked like concern.”

“Then [Coco Bean] just jumped in my lap,” Shannon says. “And her nose went straight to my left breast.”

Coco Bean started taking such deep breaths in the area that Shannon says she could no longer contain her tears.

“And I finally said it out loud,” Shannon recalls. “‘I’m pretty sure I have breast cancer.’”

Shannon says Ingrid and Jimmy embraced her with a perfect combination of caring, compassion, and eventually comedy.

“After we listened to Shannon, [I said] ‘OK, our dog smelled you cancer,’” Jimmy recalls. Then the tears turned to laughter. “‘Let’s play board games!’”

Because of Coco Bean, Shannon says she went to the doctor the next day, which led to the diagnosis of fast-growing cancer that was caught early.

“[If Coco Bean hadn’t] found it,” Shannon says, “I would have continued to ignore my body.”

Now she’s crediting Coco Bean with potentially saving her life.

“I love her,” Shannon says. “I don’t know what I could do to ever repay her.”

But Shannon does know she couldn’t be more grateful that one of the hardest times in her life includes one of the best.

“It’s such a little piece of cute in my life right now,” Shannon says. “Being able to focus on that, it’s been such a positive.”