craigdogdays.blogspot.com

Day 0: Old Dog.  New Trick.

It’s hard not to feel nervous.

I have been waiting nearly a year and a half to receive a guide dog.  And now that life-changing moment is only a couple days away.  Tomorrow, I go to Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael.  I will live there for two weeks while I learn the basics of being a guide dog partner.  In some ways, I feel like the dog in this old Far Side cartoon.

I have been legally blind for more than thirty years.  For much of that time, I have worked hard to downplay – if not downright conceal – how very limited my vision is.  I could not hide the fact that I didn’t drive.  And my children knew that when they reached a certain age, catch with Dad became a dangerous game for him.  But there was a part of me that was concerned that prospective employers would not allow me to do what I love – on-camera TV reporting – if they knew how little I could see.  So I pretty much tried to appear as un-disabled as I could. 

And maybe it worked.  I spent a couple of decades working as a reporter with no more vision than I have now (which is to say, not much).  CNN sent me to Yellowstone National Park to cover wildfires in 1988 and to Los Angeles to help with the O.J. Simpson coverage a few years later.  For them and KTVU, I covered the aftermath of the Loma Prieta Earthquake and the East Bay Hills firestorm.  For KTVU, I went to Bosnia to report on the effects of the war there, to Uganda to report on Joseph Kony and the children of war, and to Cuba for a rare American television look inside that island nation.  In between, there were hundreds of fires, floods, shootings, car accidents, city council meetings and even a Presidential visit or two.

Still, it was a lot of work acting as if I could see when I couldn’t.  So eventually I began using a blind cane.  It did make the BART ride easier.  Now when I bump into people, they apologize to me.  What could be better?

My wife has long believed a guide dog could be better.  She pushed me for years to get a guide dog.  But I was reluctant to change identities from the self-reliant disability concealer to the obviously visually impaired guy with the dog.  We visited Guide Dogs for the Blind a year and a half ago and talked to Aerial Gilbert, Outreach Manager (who herself uses a guide dog).  She explained and encouraged.  We went to a workshop for people anticipating whether to get a guide dog.  They let me test drive one.  It was cool. 

But I still had to decide if I was ready to take such a major step – to rely on and care for a dog every day.  I asked my wife for her best argument for why I should get a dog.  She said, “You don’t know what you don’t see.  I watch you when you walk, and you’re often in danger and don’t know it.”  While that “don’t know” stuff sounded a little like Donald Rumsfeld, she had a good point.  In fact, she had a convincing point.

So in February of last year, I applied.  The Guide Dogs people processed my application.   They sent someone to interview me at my home.  That person watched me walk down the street with my cane.  And Guide Dogs decided my “orientation and mobility” skills (that’s what they call the adaptive skills blind and visually impaired people use to navigate a sighted world) were remarkably unimpressive.  So they put my application on hold until I got some formal O&M training.   Once that was done, I was back in the hopper again.

Now, the time has finally come to go get that dog.  I am excited.  My family is excited.  My co-workers are excited.  In San Rafael, there is a dog waiting for me.  I will find out Monday afternoon who he or she is.  The dog is trained.  I am not.  Yet.  And so I’m also nervous.  After all, I am an old dog.  And this is a new trick.