Yesterday was a bad relapse day for me, and Steve was starting to feel really lousy. We were both coughing when he picked me up for my Embarcadero Lions Club breakfast meeting at the Cafe & Brew coffeehouse (formerly known as Perko’s). A bad coughing jag hit me less than half-way through the meeting so I left early. But we did manage to fist-target Pat to the door (he knows it as “Perko’s” because that’s easier to say than “Cafe and Brew”), and I was able to deliver a box of my mosaic jars and flower pots to use as fund-raising raffle items at upcoming events.
We took a two-hour break, and planned to work Pat on a new route, but by the time Steve got back I felt even worse and doubted I could manage the walk. So we hit the pet store to find a bin for Pat’s 40-pound bag of food, and a toy. No luck on the bin, and at first I feared no luck on the toy either. Pat’s utterly disinterested in Nylabones and Kongs, but seems to like squeaky toys. Most of those were so flimsy they’d be history in less than a minute. But Steve picked up a … well, I don’t know what it is. It feels like a big fat tennis ball trying to morph into a boomerang, and not making a good job of it. It feels sturdy, too, like it’d hold up to serious abuse, and it squeaks. Whatever it is, Pat was instantly extremely interested when I showed it to him, so that was it. We also tried clicker-training Pat to the “follow” command, but a pet store has too many distractions. So we headed for Target, hoping it would be a good place for bins, clicker-training Pat to “follow,” and cough drops.
Target was a home run. Pat stuck to Steve like a cockle-burr following him all over the store, we found just the right bin for Pat’s food, and just the right cough drops for me. We still wanted to get in at least a couple blocks of a working walk, so Steve dropped me off at the corner of Riverside and Fremont and I worked Pat home from there. Steve followed slowly in the car, and said we did well. I thought so too. I hung onto the baseball through the wobblies and coughing jags, and Pat steered me through it all without a hitch.
Our plan was to crash for a few hours and then do our night walk after dinner. An afternoon off and a nice long nap would be good recharge. So I slept for three solid hours, woke up just enough to feed Pat and give him busy time in a Twilight Zone haze, texted Steve that I was not up for any night walks, and went back to bed. I didn’t wake up again until after 9, when Andy came in to let me know he was headed to bed early, himself. I got up, took Pat out for his final busy time, and then stayed up a couple hours to eat some dinner, and went back to bed.
When I got up this morning I felt better. Still coughing and aching, but not sleep-deprived. “I think I got about fourteen hours of sleep last night,” I told Steve cheerfully when he arrived.
“I got about two,” he said. It wa obvious two hours wasn’t enough for him to feel any kind of cheerful at all.
So we kept our morning workout short, just down to Masullo’s to fist-target Pat to the door there, and back. Probably a few blocks less than going down to Vic’s and back. Masullo’s doesn't open until 11:30, but when Steve and I approached the door with Pat, one of the waiters recognized me and opened the door. “I’m just training my guide dog to know your door so I can walk here on my own next time I’m here for lunch,” I told him.
He seemed delighted and stood there with the door open, as if to watch us. We had to tell him that we needed the door closed. I wonder what it looked like, watching us from behind the glass door. I have a feeling the whole staff inside stopped to watch. I hope it looked more impressive than it was. Well, I’m sure Pat was impressive but i felt a bit of an idiot because I kept forgetting to reward Pat with my hand touching the door (instead I would bring the kibble right to Pat’s mouth as I am supposed to do at all other times). Steve’s voice is croaky from coughing, but it’s still drill-sergeant-resonant, and he kept booming out, “MARY, HAND AT THE DOOR!”
Fortunately, my goof-ups don’t seem to stop Pat from figuring it all out anyway. It’s good to have a dog smarter than I am when I have a brain fart.
Masullo’s is located in the middle of the block, so on our return home, I decided to turn around at the end of the block and walk back, counting my steps. Now I know that after I take that third street crossing, I just need to go about 50 steps and then tell Pat “Right, find Masullo’s!” And when leaving Masullo’s to go back home, I know not to take more than six steps once I’m out the door before I tell Pat “Left, find the sidewalk!” If I take more than six steps I end up too close to the street for us to make a smooth running left turn.
I thought I was feeling fairly good when we set out, but I was ready to find a soft place in the sidewalk when I was still five blocks from home. “Me too,” Steve said. So when we got home, we decided to break until mid-afternoon. I really needed that break, and I bet Steve needed it even more.
I got a tip from one of my friends about a couple homeopathic flu remedies, so this afternoon when Steve said Pat needed another “follow” session, I asked to go to Walgreens so I could get the homeopathic remedies. Pat and I amused everyone in Walgreens following Steve up and down the aisles and around hairpin twists and turns, and occasionally cutting a corner too close and bumping into things. That was bad. Pat is supposed to remember to watch out for me while he’s busy following, so I had to rework those flubbed corners. He did all the reworks perfectly.
Then we asked a clerk to help me find the homeopathic remedies I wanted: Sambuccol and Oscillococcinum. Yes. Oscillococcinum. Those guys need to come up with a more marketable name.
Really. Sambuccol isn’t so bad, but Oscillococcinum. I ask you.
So did the clerk. Or she asked me, anyway. “Are you sure you’ve spelled these right?” she asked, staring at the names I had carefully written out in very bold black felt pen on an index card. It turned out that I had misspelled Sambuccol, but I did get Oscillococcinum right.
It took the clerk several minutes to find them, and while Steve, Pat and I were patiently waiting, a coughing jag hit me again. Steve told me later that while I was coughing, a woman near us turned around and glared at me. Sometimes not being able to see is a good thing.
It was a good thing to get home, too. We considered doing another short route, but I had to admit that while I was sure I could do it, I’d also feel horrible at the end. “And I’m not at my A game,” Steve said.
So we called it a day, until dinner. (Andy and I planned to take Steve out to Tres Hermanas, one of Sacramento’s best (if not THE best) Mexican food restaurants.) One of the first things I did was take a dose of the Sambuccol and the Oscillococcinum.
And lo and behold, within twenty minutes my headache receded and I could breathe easier. The overall body aches seemed to ease up a bit too. But the best thing was that I did not cough once during our dinner at Tres Hermanas a couple hours later. Steve and Andy, however, were hacking away. It might have helped that I had chile verde. That stuff will clear out anyone’s sinuses. It was a good dinner and if we had felt better we would have lingered over it and chatted more, but as it was, we all felt like it’d been a very long day.
Tomorrow will be Steve’s last day training with Pat and me, as he leaves Saturday morning. We’ll do at least one of the routes Pat has learned (all right, let’s be realistic: we’ll do just one of the routes Pat has learned). I want to fist-target Pat to the sunroom door so that I can get back to the house at night after taking him out to the back yard for his busy time. And I’m guessing Steve has a few things up his sleeve for the last day. We’ll see.
OTHER STUFF:
Feline Progress:
Well, there hasn’t been much, actually. Steve said I need to give Pat a daily session of getting used to proper behavior around our cats. “No more than five minutes,” he said, “but it’s important to do it every day.” What’s important is not the corrections for doing it wrong, but showing Pat how I want him to behave (and rewarding him for it). Steve calls this “giving Pat both sides of the equation.” So in our daily five-minute sessions, I need not only to correct Pat for excessively exuberant behavior (jumping and lunging at the cats, whining, barking, et cetera), but I need to insist that he behave. Put him in Sit and Down positions, refuse to let him whine, and insist that he heel and walk calmly in front of them. And when I walk him past the cats and he does it calmly and smoothly without reacting to the cats, reward him.
Also, Steve says that when the cats are eating at their feeding station on the laundry room counter, I should bring Pat within about ten feet, put him in Sit-Stay and/or Down-Stay position, and get both cats and Pat familiar with each other’s presence.
So Andy and I are working out a plan. Best time to do the feed-time observance thing is in the morning. Since I’m up with Pat anyway for his first-morning busy time and feeding time, Andy will let me know when he’s feeding the cats so I can get Pat into position. As for the five-minute good behavior sessions, Andy can usually grab Patches either in the morning or evening. So we’ll just have to work at it.
It will take a while, but we will get it sorted out.
Home Training versus Residential Training:
I love the home training. For Pat and me it is working extraordinarily well, better than I ever thought it would. I think this is because he is an exceptionally mature and intelligent dog (apart from his attitude about cats, that is), and because I am an experienced (and very good) guide dog user. And Pat and I are a good match — “one of the best matches I’ve seen,” as Steve said.
But I’m exhausted. I'm spinning so many plates in the air. The two biggest and heaviest plates are Trace and Andy, not necessarily in that order.
Trace has been such a good sport about Pat, and I love that Pat seems to know he needs to be gentle around Trace. But Trace still needs a lot of attention, and I’m the one who gives it to him. He has never bonded to Andy the way April did. In one sense it is harder bringing Pat home to Trace than it was bringing Trace home to April, because April was a lot younger, only 9, compared to Trace’s 12 1/2. At the time I brought Trace home to April, I was not struggling with anticipatory grief the way I am with Trace now. He’s not much longer for this world. I know it is time for him to go, and I am not in any way trying to make him last longer by whatever means possible. Indeed, I am refusing invasive medical treatment for him because I am determined that his end days be as comfortable and happy as possible.
But sometimes I feel the weight of my grief is breaking me into a thousand pieces.
Andy helps a lot by taking over Trace’s morning feeding (as he has for years) and taking Trace back to the master bedroom at night while I stay in the front bedroom with Pat. But I’m the one who gives Trace his afternoon feeding, who parks him as often as he needs it (about once every hour and sometimes oftener), who grooms him, who senses how tired he is all day and how skinny he is getting. My heart aches for him, and it breaks for him when I know he’s in pain.
And then there is Andy, spinning along with a whole bunch of other plates. Andy is not so much an issue in terms of jealousy because I’m using a dog again instead of his arm. (There is a bit of that. Not much, and not unreasonably, and very likely not something he’d admit to. But still, there is a tiny bit of jealousy and resentment.)
Andy is an issue because I haven’t had have time for him, nor time to do the things he’s used to having me do, and that leads us to whole bunch of other plates in the air.
Andy hasn’t had a single home-cooked meal since I started training with Pat. He’s had to either bring home dinner or take me out dinner every night.
Andy doesn’t have any clean dry towels for his shower (unless he did some laundry on his own, which I doubt, grin). By now he’s running out of his fave socks, underwear and knit shirts, and is working on his least-fave ones, because I haven’t had time to deal with the laundry.
And during this whole training time, as I’ve already mentioned, I’ve been staying in the front guest bedroom with Pat while Andy takes Trace back to his crate in the master bedroom and sleeps there by himself. It gets lonely for both of us.
The one big huge advantage of doing an in-residence training program is that being away from all the usual drags and drains on your emotional, physical and spiritual energy allows you to focus more effectively on bonding with your dog. And the distance from all those home drags and drains can be truly uplifting.
Another advantage is, you’re not alone. It really is a boot camp of sorts, and in a way, you always have special memories of your boot camp mates, even if you don’t keep up with them after you’ve moved on.
The upshot as I see it: if you’re a first-time guide dog user, do the in-residence training program. First-time guide dog users are better off in a supportive environment where they don’t have to juggle powerful conflicting loyalties and priorities. You will when you get home with your new dog, but at least you got that two-week-plus period of time alone together to bond with your dog. I think guide dog users (and their guide dogs) who best benefit from home training are the experienced guide dog users and the dogs that are smarter than the average bear,
And now, it’s time for me to crash. More tomorrow.
We took a two-hour break, and planned to work Pat on a new route, but by the time Steve got back I felt even worse and doubted I could manage the walk. So we hit the pet store to find a bin for Pat’s 40-pound bag of food, and a toy. No luck on the bin, and at first I feared no luck on the toy either. Pat’s utterly disinterested in Nylabones and Kongs, but seems to like squeaky toys. Most of those were so flimsy they’d be history in less than a minute. But Steve picked up a … well, I don’t know what it is. It feels like a big fat tennis ball trying to morph into a boomerang, and not making a good job of it. It feels sturdy, too, like it’d hold up to serious abuse, and it squeaks. Whatever it is, Pat was instantly extremely interested when I showed it to him, so that was it. We also tried clicker-training Pat to the “follow” command, but a pet store has too many distractions. So we headed for Target, hoping it would be a good place for bins, clicker-training Pat to “follow,” and cough drops.
Target was a home run. Pat stuck to Steve like a cockle-burr following him all over the store, we found just the right bin for Pat’s food, and just the right cough drops for me. We still wanted to get in at least a couple blocks of a working walk, so Steve dropped me off at the corner of Riverside and Fremont and I worked Pat home from there. Steve followed slowly in the car, and said we did well. I thought so too. I hung onto the baseball through the wobblies and coughing jags, and Pat steered me through it all without a hitch.
Our plan was to crash for a few hours and then do our night walk after dinner. An afternoon off and a nice long nap would be good recharge. So I slept for three solid hours, woke up just enough to feed Pat and give him busy time in a Twilight Zone haze, texted Steve that I was not up for any night walks, and went back to bed. I didn’t wake up again until after 9, when Andy came in to let me know he was headed to bed early, himself. I got up, took Pat out for his final busy time, and then stayed up a couple hours to eat some dinner, and went back to bed.
When I got up this morning I felt better. Still coughing and aching, but not sleep-deprived. “I think I got about fourteen hours of sleep last night,” I told Steve cheerfully when he arrived.
“I got about two,” he said. It wa obvious two hours wasn’t enough for him to feel any kind of cheerful at all.
So we kept our morning workout short, just down to Masullo’s to fist-target Pat to the door there, and back. Probably a few blocks less than going down to Vic’s and back. Masullo’s doesn't open until 11:30, but when Steve and I approached the door with Pat, one of the waiters recognized me and opened the door. “I’m just training my guide dog to know your door so I can walk here on my own next time I’m here for lunch,” I told him.
He seemed delighted and stood there with the door open, as if to watch us. We had to tell him that we needed the door closed. I wonder what it looked like, watching us from behind the glass door. I have a feeling the whole staff inside stopped to watch. I hope it looked more impressive than it was. Well, I’m sure Pat was impressive but i felt a bit of an idiot because I kept forgetting to reward Pat with my hand touching the door (instead I would bring the kibble right to Pat’s mouth as I am supposed to do at all other times). Steve’s voice is croaky from coughing, but it’s still drill-sergeant-resonant, and he kept booming out, “MARY, HAND AT THE DOOR!”
Fortunately, my goof-ups don’t seem to stop Pat from figuring it all out anyway. It’s good to have a dog smarter than I am when I have a brain fart.
Masullo’s is located in the middle of the block, so on our return home, I decided to turn around at the end of the block and walk back, counting my steps. Now I know that after I take that third street crossing, I just need to go about 50 steps and then tell Pat “Right, find Masullo’s!” And when leaving Masullo’s to go back home, I know not to take more than six steps once I’m out the door before I tell Pat “Left, find the sidewalk!” If I take more than six steps I end up too close to the street for us to make a smooth running left turn.
I thought I was feeling fairly good when we set out, but I was ready to find a soft place in the sidewalk when I was still five blocks from home. “Me too,” Steve said. So when we got home, we decided to break until mid-afternoon. I really needed that break, and I bet Steve needed it even more.
I got a tip from one of my friends about a couple homeopathic flu remedies, so this afternoon when Steve said Pat needed another “follow” session, I asked to go to Walgreens so I could get the homeopathic remedies. Pat and I amused everyone in Walgreens following Steve up and down the aisles and around hairpin twists and turns, and occasionally cutting a corner too close and bumping into things. That was bad. Pat is supposed to remember to watch out for me while he’s busy following, so I had to rework those flubbed corners. He did all the reworks perfectly.
Then we asked a clerk to help me find the homeopathic remedies I wanted: Sambuccol and Oscillococcinum. Yes. Oscillococcinum. Those guys need to come up with a more marketable name.
Really. Sambuccol isn’t so bad, but Oscillococcinum. I ask you.
So did the clerk. Or she asked me, anyway. “Are you sure you’ve spelled these right?” she asked, staring at the names I had carefully written out in very bold black felt pen on an index card. It turned out that I had misspelled Sambuccol, but I did get Oscillococcinum right.
It took the clerk several minutes to find them, and while Steve, Pat and I were patiently waiting, a coughing jag hit me again. Steve told me later that while I was coughing, a woman near us turned around and glared at me. Sometimes not being able to see is a good thing.
It was a good thing to get home, too. We considered doing another short route, but I had to admit that while I was sure I could do it, I’d also feel horrible at the end. “And I’m not at my A game,” Steve said.
So we called it a day, until dinner. (Andy and I planned to take Steve out to Tres Hermanas, one of Sacramento’s best (if not THE best) Mexican food restaurants.) One of the first things I did was take a dose of the Sambuccol and the Oscillococcinum.
And lo and behold, within twenty minutes my headache receded and I could breathe easier. The overall body aches seemed to ease up a bit too. But the best thing was that I did not cough once during our dinner at Tres Hermanas a couple hours later. Steve and Andy, however, were hacking away. It might have helped that I had chile verde. That stuff will clear out anyone’s sinuses. It was a good dinner and if we had felt better we would have lingered over it and chatted more, but as it was, we all felt like it’d been a very long day.
Tomorrow will be Steve’s last day training with Pat and me, as he leaves Saturday morning. We’ll do at least one of the routes Pat has learned (all right, let’s be realistic: we’ll do just one of the routes Pat has learned). I want to fist-target Pat to the sunroom door so that I can get back to the house at night after taking him out to the back yard for his busy time. And I’m guessing Steve has a few things up his sleeve for the last day. We’ll see.
OTHER STUFF:
Feline Progress:
Well, there hasn’t been much, actually. Steve said I need to give Pat a daily session of getting used to proper behavior around our cats. “No more than five minutes,” he said, “but it’s important to do it every day.” What’s important is not the corrections for doing it wrong, but showing Pat how I want him to behave (and rewarding him for it). Steve calls this “giving Pat both sides of the equation.” So in our daily five-minute sessions, I need not only to correct Pat for excessively exuberant behavior (jumping and lunging at the cats, whining, barking, et cetera), but I need to insist that he behave. Put him in Sit and Down positions, refuse to let him whine, and insist that he heel and walk calmly in front of them. And when I walk him past the cats and he does it calmly and smoothly without reacting to the cats, reward him.
Also, Steve says that when the cats are eating at their feeding station on the laundry room counter, I should bring Pat within about ten feet, put him in Sit-Stay and/or Down-Stay position, and get both cats and Pat familiar with each other’s presence.
So Andy and I are working out a plan. Best time to do the feed-time observance thing is in the morning. Since I’m up with Pat anyway for his first-morning busy time and feeding time, Andy will let me know when he’s feeding the cats so I can get Pat into position. As for the five-minute good behavior sessions, Andy can usually grab Patches either in the morning or evening. So we’ll just have to work at it.
It will take a while, but we will get it sorted out.
Home Training versus Residential Training:
I love the home training. For Pat and me it is working extraordinarily well, better than I ever thought it would. I think this is because he is an exceptionally mature and intelligent dog (apart from his attitude about cats, that is), and because I am an experienced (and very good) guide dog user. And Pat and I are a good match — “one of the best matches I’ve seen,” as Steve said.
But I’m exhausted. I'm spinning so many plates in the air. The two biggest and heaviest plates are Trace and Andy, not necessarily in that order.
Trace has been such a good sport about Pat, and I love that Pat seems to know he needs to be gentle around Trace. But Trace still needs a lot of attention, and I’m the one who gives it to him. He has never bonded to Andy the way April did. In one sense it is harder bringing Pat home to Trace than it was bringing Trace home to April, because April was a lot younger, only 9, compared to Trace’s 12 1/2. At the time I brought Trace home to April, I was not struggling with anticipatory grief the way I am with Trace now. He’s not much longer for this world. I know it is time for him to go, and I am not in any way trying to make him last longer by whatever means possible. Indeed, I am refusing invasive medical treatment for him because I am determined that his end days be as comfortable and happy as possible.
But sometimes I feel the weight of my grief is breaking me into a thousand pieces.
Andy helps a lot by taking over Trace’s morning feeding (as he has for years) and taking Trace back to the master bedroom at night while I stay in the front bedroom with Pat. But I’m the one who gives Trace his afternoon feeding, who parks him as often as he needs it (about once every hour and sometimes oftener), who grooms him, who senses how tired he is all day and how skinny he is getting. My heart aches for him, and it breaks for him when I know he’s in pain.
And then there is Andy, spinning along with a whole bunch of other plates. Andy is not so much an issue in terms of jealousy because I’m using a dog again instead of his arm. (There is a bit of that. Not much, and not unreasonably, and very likely not something he’d admit to. But still, there is a tiny bit of jealousy and resentment.)
Andy is an issue because I haven’t had have time for him, nor time to do the things he’s used to having me do, and that leads us to whole bunch of other plates in the air.
Andy hasn’t had a single home-cooked meal since I started training with Pat. He’s had to either bring home dinner or take me out dinner every night.
Andy doesn’t have any clean dry towels for his shower (unless he did some laundry on his own, which I doubt, grin). By now he’s running out of his fave socks, underwear and knit shirts, and is working on his least-fave ones, because I haven’t had time to deal with the laundry.
And during this whole training time, as I’ve already mentioned, I’ve been staying in the front guest bedroom with Pat while Andy takes Trace back to his crate in the master bedroom and sleeps there by himself. It gets lonely for both of us.
The one big huge advantage of doing an in-residence training program is that being away from all the usual drags and drains on your emotional, physical and spiritual energy allows you to focus more effectively on bonding with your dog. And the distance from all those home drags and drains can be truly uplifting.
Another advantage is, you’re not alone. It really is a boot camp of sorts, and in a way, you always have special memories of your boot camp mates, even if you don’t keep up with them after you’ve moved on.
The upshot as I see it: if you’re a first-time guide dog user, do the in-residence training program. First-time guide dog users are better off in a supportive environment where they don’t have to juggle powerful conflicting loyalties and priorities. You will when you get home with your new dog, but at least you got that two-week-plus period of time alone together to bond with your dog. I think guide dog users (and their guide dogs) who best benefit from home training are the experienced guide dog users and the dogs that are smarter than the average bear,
And now, it’s time for me to crash. More tomorrow.
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