Double Miracle — Severely Abused Puppy Recovers To Form Bond With Autistic Boy


When eight-year-old Jonny Hickey got his new dog last year, everything changed — for him and his mom. Jonny has autism and though he is able to communicate, the condition caused him to suffer extreme social anxiety and spend most of his time in silence, playing marbles.

But when Xena came into the house, a seemingly miraculous transformation took place.

“He is non-stop chatter now!” Linda Hickey, 44, told The Today Show last year. “He has so much to say about his math, about what he did in P.E. He is the happiest child that I’ve ever seen him be in eight years.”

But the arrival of Xena in the Hickey household was itself a miracle.

The poor dog was found passed out in the yard of a home in DeKalb County, Georgia. When the dog was brought in to the county’s animal shelter, Chrissy Kaczynski, who has been rescuing animals for a dozen years, didn’t believe that the poor puppy would last out the night.

“She was completely dehydrated and her nose was all scabbed over, like she had been trying to escape something,” Kaczynski said. She believes that Xena was kept and starved in a cage most of her life, then cruelly dumped.

But with help from the shelter workers, she battled back. That’s why she was named after Xena, The Warrior Princess.

Now though Xena is Jonny’s dog, she also visits sick children and inmates in the Atlanta jail, because she has plenty of miracles to go around.

Watch this moving CNN video to see the whole story of Xena and Jonny.

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