Hatred to Hope

This is a post as part of the Assistance Dog Blog Carnival. The topic of the July 2011 ADBC is "The Difference".
First difference- my participation in the Assistance Dog Blog Carnival. I haven’t done this before.
Second difference- remembering I have this blog.

To the main difference: Duncan.

I’ve been sick, ill, disabled by various things since I was 8. When I was 7 my parents bred a litter of English Setters from Tamoka lines. They kept the runt, a female, for my brother and me. Somewhere along the line, she became my heart dog and I bought out my brother’s share. When I was sick, she cared for me as best she could. We called her a “Nurse Dog”, because service dogs, assistance dogs, they were for the blind, the deaf, the wheelchair users, the amputees. They were not for people like me: people with balance issues, with health problems, with fatigue issues, who still look normal, who can still pass for healthy if we’re careful.

For nearly fourteen years Twink was the love of my life. She did tasks- taking messages from me to my parents, helping to get me out of bed, retrieving things I dropped, and other things I’ve forgotten with time. Training her pulled me out of myself and my misery. When I took an entire bottle of Tylenol because I couldn’t imagine living like that anymore, she wouldn’t let me sleep. When I vomited for three days, she stayed with me. When I slept 22 hours a day, she only left my side if my mom would watch me. Her love never came with conditions, and somehow, that reached past my self-loathing and despair.

When she was euthanized, I lost myself for a couple years. I was in college. I was without a dog. I didn’t think I could have a dog in the dorm, because I assumed I could only have a pet. I knew nothing of ESAs (Emotional Support Animals) and the Fair Housing Act, or I would have hit the pound the next day. My disabilities were getting worse, new ones layering on the ones I’d had for years. I felt myself spiraling down, and I didn’t know what to do. I was out of hope, out of the will to go on.

I couldn’t imagine living my whole life in stress, in pain, with my body betraying me daily. I went to counseling, I talked to a shrink, and I couldn’t make progress. I didn’t like myself. I hated being trapped in this body, in the pain. Then, one day I searched service dogs and my new disabilities- the balance problems, the falling, the dizziness.

I found hope.

For the first time in years, I had hope. What a powerful feeling. There were people out there, laws out there, that said I could have a service dog to help me. I didn’t have to be blind or deaf or not be able to walk on my own two feet (though I was getting there). I could train a dog to do what Twink did, to go with me in public, to help with the falling and retrieve things. A dog to make my life less of a struggle. I told my shrink about it, and she told me it was a bad idea, that I needed to address my self-loathing and not use a dog to cover that feeling.

I cancelled my next appointment and never went back. I’d been spending hundreds of dollars trying to express how helpless, hopeless and hateful trying to make my body work in ways it couldn’t had made me. How I just couldn’t do it anymore, and how there was no deep seated joy in anything because it was all such a struggle. It was all work. Even the things I did for fun, I had to fight my body to do. I wasn’t sure I could do it anymore. I had no more reserves- not even of stubbornness. I was ready to give up and stop trying.

Finding out that there could be a service dog, a partner, a helpmate in my life was a new beginning. It was a difference in my thought patterns. Instead of dreading the next day, I watched myself struggle, made notes on what I needed help with, and I made plans to train a dog to help. More than just semester to semester, day to day things, but a whole future.

I made the choice to owner-train because I couldn’t imagine going to a program during school. I knew how close to the end of my rope I was, and I didn’t think I could wait until I graduated. Training Twink, training dozens of other dogs, I felt I could do the training if I could find a good candidate.

I searched many shelters in my area, saw hundreds of dogs, evaluated a couple dozen. I actually found two dogs- one yellow lab bitch, and the mutt who would eventually become Duncan. The lab was at a shelter who wouldn’t adopt to me, because we had intact males at home. She was already spayed, but their policies were rigid. So, because of a difference of opinions about intact animals meaning a person was a bad owner, I defaulted to Duncan.

He was younger than I’d planned on getting, not black, like I’d planned on getting, and not the dog I was imagining. Where Twink was small (42 pounds), mostly white, fluffy, reserved and picky, he was mostly brown, large (72 pounds when I found him, now 90 pounds), short coated, gregarious, mouthy, and playful.

He was more than I had hoped for, in many ways. He’s going to be 5 sometime this August. In the four years I’ve owned him, in the four years we’ve worked together, he’s seen me through my last year of school, two jobs, and every time I ask him to learn something new, do something different, he finds a way.

He’s brought me a kind of peace. From the walk out of the shelter to the car, when he snagged the wooden doorstop, he’s been a fetch-head. Almost overnight, my anxiety about dropping things and being too dizzy to pick them up without falling down was gone. I didn’t have to bend, I didn’t have to fall, I didn’t have to ask others. I dropped something, he picked it up. If I dropped it again, he picked it up again and held it a little longer so I could get a better grip. Within the first month, he was trying to get under me and try to stop my falls. He started alerting to the falling spells before I had them. I didn’t have to be forever vigilant, he would let me know. Using him for momentum pull meant that my fatigue levels dropped. I could do more with him than I could do without him.

Having Duncan has taken my life from a minute to minute struggle to something I no longer endlessly worry about, fret about, doubt my ability to make it through the next day. He’s taken me from planning how to end my life to planning for an entire life. I know he won’t be there for my whole life, and that makes me choke up, but with his help, I hope to have a successor dog trained up well before he’s got to retire. And even if I can’t have an “emergency backup dog” [1] in place before Duncan’s retired, he’s shown me how an assistance dog is able to be a bridge between what my brain wants to do and what my body is capable of handling. My life with a service dog is a completely different life than an existence without a dog.


[1] credit for the EBD goes to Andrea at Manor of Mixed Blessings