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Karen Smith's service dog, Ginger, helps pull her during a fatigue episode. Smith, an East Haven resident, suffers from multiple sclerosis.

Karen Smith is pictured with her former service dog, Ginger, at Lyman Orchards.

Karen Smith’s former service dog, Ginger, meets her on the ice after a sled hockey game.

They did everything together. They took yoga classes and visited apple orchards. They went hiking and ran errands.

Ginger, Karen Smith’s service dog, was there every morning when Smith woke up and every night when she went to sleep. If Smith needed to turn off the lights but couldn’t get to the switch, Ginger did it for her.

When Smith got out of bed, Ginger helped her keep her balance. If she dropped something, Ginger picked it up.

With Ginger by her side, Smith even played as the goalie for U.S. team in the 2014 IPC Ice Sledge Hockey Women’s International Cup, taking home a gold medal.

A volunteer animal rescuer from East Haven with a background in veterinary medicine, dogs became crucial to Smith’s independence after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the early 1990s, Smith said.

But since Ginger died three years ago, Smith has struggled to find another eligible canine, she said. After locating a breeder with puppies available, she finally has a path forward — she just needs to raise enough money for adoption, training and equipment.

Service dogs are hard to come by and require years of training, she said. Between paying for travel, training, veterinary care and the dog itself, she expects her next canine partner to cost $15,000, she said.

She hopes a GoFundMe page will help get her there.

“Service dogs are just simply amazing because they help you to be what you want to be without having to ask a whole lot other people,” she said. “If you’re a fiercely independent person like I’ve always been, the last thing you want to wanna do is ask people all the time, ‘Can you do this, can you do that?’”

MS patients often struggle with balance, according to Smith. At times the disease has left her dependent on a wheelchair, while on good days she can use canes, she said.

“That’s how MS is. It changes every single day and you basically take inventory in the morning” to see which arms and legs work, she said.

Getting a service dog “changed (her) life,” Smith said.

She has had two, both of them golden retrievers. The first, Dakota, died in 2008.

“Ginger had this intuition that was just amazing,” Smith said. “She knew what I wanted before I even asked for it.”

Because it can be dangerous for MS patients to reach to pick up items off the ground, Smith said, Ginger would do it for her.

She would fetch Smith bottles of water, pull Smith’s wheelchair when needed and turn the lights off before bed.

After hockey games, Ginger would carry Smith’s equipment off the ice. When Smith decided to practice wheelchair tennis alone, Ginger would carry the balls back to her, Smith said.

Having a service dog also went a long way toward improving Smith’s emotional well-being, she said.

And it changed the way people interacted with her.

“That’s the other side of what a service dog does for you,” Smith said. “It opens your world up to have people look at you very differently, you know, and all of a sudden you’re the cool person with a dog. You’re not just the poor person in a wheelchair.”

When Ginger died in October 2018, “it was like my heart got ripped out and it was like my independence just stood still, you know, and all of a sudden my life changed again,” Smith said.

Finding a new service dog has been vexing.

Christy Gardner runs Mission Working Dogs, a Maine-based service dog school where Smith hopes to train her next canine.

Gardner, an Army veteran and bilateral leg amputee, has experienced the benefits of service dogs first-hand. Accompanied by a golden retriever named Moxie, she played alongside Smith on the sledge hockey team.

Gardner launched Mission Working Dogs in July to fill a need in her state, she said.

“It’s extremely difficult (to find a service dog) and it’s extremely expensive, normally,” Gardner said. “A proper service dog takes like 2 years of training, and they have to be unflappable in all sorts of situations.”

In her own search for a dog, Smith said COVID-19 caused another problem — a surging demand for puppies.

“You’re looking for these certain traits and they have to be a certain size. So, I’m looking for a good breeder and all of a sudden I’m getting all these responses that say, ‘I’m sorry, but I have a waiting list through 2023,’” Smith said. “During the pandemic everyone decided they needed a dog.”

Recognizing the trend might not draw the best dog owners, some breeders put their puppy businesses on hold, according to Smith.

After months of searching, Smith finally found a breeder, she said.

While she still needs to apply for a spot in Gardner’s program, she’s aiming to train the dog her former teammate’s school.

Now it’s a question of paying the bills.

Annie Richardson has been spreading the word about Smith’s fundraiser. She called Smith “one of the best-hearted people ... I have ever met in my entire life.”

She described Smith, who spends her good days searching for lost dogs and getting injured critters to safety, as the type of person who always is willing to help others.

Now, Richardson hopes the community will help Smith.

Smith’s GoFundMe page can be found at https://gofund.me/1c44c446.

Meghan Friedmann covers North Branford, Guilford and Madison. Before joining the Register team, she worked on an independent journalism project about migration in Berlin, Germany. When she's not reporting, you can find her hiking Shoreline trails and eating her way through New Haven. She welcomes feedback and story ideas from readers.