A dog in New York managed to save his pregnant owner, after getting help when she suffered a seizure.

Janelle Giannetta was 26 weeks pregnant when the incident occurred, Newsday reports.  Giannetta’s year-old goldendoodle cross-breed Louie was able to alert her husband when she was in distress.

“I heard the dog barking like crazy, like I’ve never heard him bark before,” Richard Giannetta, Janelle’s husband, said when speaking to CBS.  “Just an agitated bark like something was wrong, I could just tell.”

The woman in Long Island suffered an unexpected seizure in her North Merrick home on Friday afternoon. Knowing the dog rarely barks, Richard ran upstairs to find out why Louie was acting unusually. “I turned her over, her tongue was in her mouth and she had white foam all around her mouth,” Richard said.

It was later determined that Giannetta suffered from eclampsia, a condition which causes pregnant women to have abnormally high blood pressure – triggering potentially life-threatening seizures of this sort. If Louie hadn’t alerted Richard, there’s no telling what could have happened as a result.

Giannetta was treated at the Nassau University Medical Center soon after, where she had an emergency Caesarean section and gave birth to a healthy daughter, but prematurely – Charlotte Marie. “Typically, there are warning signs but many of the signs that you see you think maybe its just the pregnancy in itself,” explained Dr. Peter Hong of the medical centre.