Coordinating Colors

I'm one of those handlers who wants my gear to be minimalistic, plain reading, and, for Keeper's safety, eye-searingly bright (and preferably reflective).

Personally, I like royal blue and hunter green. Too many years in the hunt/jump and dressage world where the choices were black, brown, or havana brown, and not enough time in the eventing and Western pleasure barns where bright colors and bling were necessary to present the right picture. When it came time to buy gear for Duncan, I went with blues, and stuck with blues his whole career. Everything matched, without thought or trying.

That changed with Keeper. While I still like blue, in Duncan's royal blue gear, Keeper got bumped into and stepped on. She was wearing hot pink at WorldCon, standing next to me, when a lady asked where my dog was. Keeper is my very best ninja of unobtrusiveness.

If she's standing next to me, she doesn't want to make eye contact or flirt with people. She wants to mind her own bees-wax and do her job. That lack of eye contact (and not having Duncan's bright amber eyes) means that a surprising number of people overlook her. A lot (a LOT) of people still see her and comment on how pretty she is, but the bright pack color helps the otherwise unaware.

When it came time to get Keeper her own work gear, I waffled on lime green or hot pink. Hoping to cut down on having to answer the "boy or girl" question, I got Keeper a hot pink backpack. This was a mistake. I hate pink. I love red, but there's just something about pink that irritates me (might just be pastels). But hot pink kept people from running into her (or over her), so it worked well enough.... only, I still hate pink, and people still ask if she's a boy.

So, when I ordered Keeper a custom harness, I ordered it with a lime green liner and the embroidery came in the same color. I asked for (and got!) a lime green leash and backpack as gifts this year. The backpack is in a new design that I hate when it's on the underharness, but looks alright when just the top of the backpack attached to her custom harness. That means that her collar, her leash, her harness and her pack all match now. There's still a lot of hand sewing I need to do to get the patches on, but I'm happy with how it's coming together. (I had to undo the one in the picture, I'd put it on crooked.)

Keeper stands and looks at the camera in a bright lime pack with a leash loop over her shoulder.

Bereavement

I started out 2016 with a fear that Duncan had bone cancer and I'd lose him. I was so relieved when the x-rays came back clear. And then I lost him to lung cancer. Mom almost choked to death. I had surgery. My job's been unnecessarily stressful (it's really a simple job, but the management has flushed morale down the toilet.)

Sometimes I jokingly tell my shrink that denial is my superpower. Denying that things hurt, so long as I still have a decent range of motion, is how I keep going. So I've been, in large part, shoving aside my grief over Duncan, or tackling it in small doses, and then going back to being in denial.

I have to fight back tears at the passing thought of him, and I'm crying now. Some of it is misplaced guilt- I was battling a flare, the other dogs had a mild stomach upset, they got better, so I waited, assuming his issue was their issue and he too would be better in a few days. And guilt that when they talked about humane euthanasia at discharge that first time I was not ready to hear it (we weren't even sure it was cancer then.)

There are days when I seek out pictures or videos of him, but mostly I avoid them, because they bring the razor's edge of the loss and the grief with them. Which means that I don't tell stories about him like I used to, and I didn't leave a lot of room for anyone else to talk about him. Which was not wholly fair, as other people felt the loss, too, and may have wishes to reminisce, but it is what I had to do to keep moving.

Losing Duncan has left wounds I'm not sure I know the extent of, and still I'm getting ready to do it all again. Having him in my life brought me such joy. Working with him brought me a freedom from the limits of my body. The reason it hurts so much now is that it worked so well before.

In some ways, that is the best testament to his working career I could have. I lost him more than three years after he retired, and I'm still grieving what a help he was, as well as grieving who he was. Loving him so much means that it hurts to live without him. I don't know that it will ever stop hurting to know that he's gone, but all I can do is make space for that pain and keep moving.

Animal Magnetizism

I work a service dog in public. Have for the better part of a decade now. Having the dog help me means my life is vastly improved. Having the dog in public means that I draw comments and attention I would not otherwise.

I went to WorldCon with a bright blue pixie cut. 4 comments on my hair, literally thousands on Keeper. For context, that is 4 comments on things that I did for fun and because I enjoy it, and would have enjoyed talking about it. Thousands of distractions while my disoriented, disabled self is trying to navigate across a convention hall that's several blocks long, through hundreds or thousands of people in the hallways. It's a chaotic environment and I'm fielding questions and comments at a steady rate of several a minute.

These people are polite, for the most part. I only had one person try to pet without asking, and only a few blatantly expressed disappointment when they asked and I told them no. We've gotten very good about doing a side-step maneuver so when the unthinking (or the assholes) stop dead in front of Keeper and reach for her face, we don't break stride and I don't fall down or have muscle spasms.

I have had people in cars stop so I'm trapped on a walkway to talk to me about the dog. I've had people say "go pet the doggy!" and sic their children on me. I've had rookie K9 handlers stop me in the grocery store to ask about dog training.

Most of the time it is not malicious- they're not trying to point out that I'm disabled. They don't know what my issues are or what my dog is trained to do, how we work as a team so I can get out of the house. They don't understand that I want to be seen for myself, not the president of Keeper's fan club. Some assume I'm only training the dog because I can still walk. They just see a dog and act the way they're used to acting around pet dogs.

It is exhausting. It is frustrating. It is inescapable.

And this is my reality. People don't respect the normal social boundaries because they see a dog, they want to pet it, and my needs are the farthest thought from their mind. It is a candid admission that they don't see me as a real person- or they'd ignore me as they ignore everyone else in the store. Because I'm no longer a real person, my runs to the grocery store for milk and eggs is better done at 2am when there's no one rather than at 2pm when some old woman will cut me off with her cart and tell me stories about her dead dog. Yes, I can and have turned around and gone back out of the aisle, but it costs me time and energy that is physically precious and some days hard to come by.

Dealing with these interactions is part of working a service dog in public. The extra attention, the extra time to dodge people, is a constant. Some disabled individuals stop using their dogs and stop going out because it's overwhelming, or it's not worth the help the dog provides when they have other alternatives.

Me, personally, I don't have good options for all the things my dogs are trained to do. So I deal with it as best I can. But that doesn't mean that having someone go "hey, puppy!" doesn't annoy me, or that having them make kissy noises and get louder as they call my dog again because she is ignoring them (just like I trained her to) doesn't piss me off. It's a dog in a library with "SERVICE DOG" in 2 inch high letters. The signals are there. People ignore them. And that's with the benefit of the doubt that they don't know that calling my dog out from under me could cause me to fall and be injured.

If you see a service dog, please ignore them. I know that's hard for dog lovers, and I know we're almost as rare as a unicorn in your life, but you likely aren't the first... or the fifth... or the fortieth person to say something.