For people who love each other so much, being apart for five weeks can seem like a lifetime.
And Shane Godfrey wasn’t sure if he was ever going to see his dog Willie again.
“They weren’t sure if I would make it for a while,” he told The Dodo
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Shane found Willie as an abandoned puppy that was left on his porch in 2016.
Ever since then, they were two peas in a pod.
The only thing that was able to separate those two was when Shane was hospitalized in 2017 with a terrible case of the flu.
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That flu turned into double pneumonia and then kidney failure, sepsis, and encephalitis.
But Shane was a fighter and finally improved after five weeks in the hospital.
During that time, Shane lost a whole lot of weight, a total of 50 pounds.
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When he was ready to be discharged, Shane couldn’t wait to see his buddy Willie who was staying with his sister.
But the reunion didn’t go completely as expected. That’s because Willie didn’t quite recognize Shane right away.
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“I had lost 50 pounds in the hospital and am sure I looked different,” Shane said. “At first he was unsure and barked at me but once he got close enough to smell me he recognized me immediately and totally went wild with excitement. It still makes me tear up when I see the video.”
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That video ended up going massively viral.
It was viewed more than 12.3 million times on The Dodo’s YouTube page.
The video begins with Shane sitting on a bench and his dog walking toward him from behind.
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“He don’t know you, look,” someone can be heard saying off camera.
That’s when Willie gives out a suspicious “woof” at Shane.
Then he keeps barking at Shane as if he is a stranger.
“He doesn’t know him,” says another off-camera.
Willie is barking and walking from one side of the bench to the other to get a better look at Shane while still staying at a safe distance.
Willie seems like he senses something familiar about the man on the bench but can’t quite figure it out.
Eventually, a woman slowly walks Willie over to Shane.
At this point, Willie still doesn’t recognize Shane.
Until he gets a quick whiff of him.
Willie starts sniffing Shane and almost immediately recognizes his buddy’s scent.
Then Willie starts nuzzling his nose into his human and wildly wags his tail.
“It’s really him!” someone says off-camera.
Willie jumps up on his dad and starts covering him with doggy kisses.
“He’s like, ‘Where have you been, Daddy?'” someone says. “Where have you been.”
And the happy look on both of their faces is truly priceless.
“It’s crazy that every person has a distinct smell and the dogs just recognize their owners by that even if they’re blind,” one YouTuber wrote.
As it turns out lots of others have had the same kind of experience with their dogs.
“That happened to my brother when he was gone for 3 years in Afghanistan. When he came back, his dog didn’t know who he was at all until the dog sniffed him and the same thing happened here! So very heart warming,” another YouTuber wrote.
Check out Shane and Willie’s heartwarming reunion in the video below.
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