How To (and Not To) Interact with a Service Dog Team

People can get really stupid when they encounter a service dog team.  Some of this falls under the category of “People really do that?”, and I promise you, they do.  Some of it may not seem so obvious to someone who isn’t a service dog handler.  For the purposes of this blog, I am referring to legitimate teams.

1) Do Not Feed My Dog.  Seriously, people will try to do this.  I know he’s cute.  I know you think he deserves a treat, but what you don’t know is if the dog is on a special diet.  The dog may have food allergies or another medical condition that requires a specialized diet.  Even if that’s not the case, he doesn’t eat while working.

2) Don’t Follow Me Yelling About My SD Being Abused:  I assure you, 99.9% of all service dogs are pampered and loved.  They also LOVE their jobs.  They don’t see “work” as the 4-lettered word many people do.  If a service dog doesn’t want to work, they don’t last long and are washed out or retired pretty quickly.  My service dog gets excited and jumps around when he sees his harness come out.

3) Do Not Pet My Dog Without Permission:  Each handler has their own “rule” when it comes to allowing or not allowing people to pet their dogs.  For some people, it depends on the way the dog will respond.  For other people, it depends on how they will react to the attention.  Do not assume because you see one person petting the dog, that it means you can, too.  For example, I’m pretty strict on not allowing petting, but I have a couple of exceptions.  One is if the person is a child who is afraid of my service dog, and allowing them to pet him will calm the child.  The other is if we run into a friend we see rarely.  Otherwise, I explain that he is working and can not socialize on the job.

4) Do Not Bark At My Dog:  No, really, people do this.  Grown people do this.  It makes you look like an idiot, so just don’t.

5) Do Not Ask What My Disability Is:  My disability is my private medical information.  You don’t want me asking how your last mental health evaluation (or prostate exam, or GYN exam) went.  My medical information is private.  On the same note, don’t ask what my dog is trained to do EXACTLY.  I can’t answer that without revealing my medical information.

6) Do Not Assume I Can Not Hear/See You:  We are not all deaf or blind.  Many of us have other disabilities that allow us to hear and see you.  So, when you encourage your child to pet my dog, I will (and I have) turn around and call you out for it.

7) Try To Resist Curiosity:  I know you are curious.  I know that we may be the only service dog team you have ever run into.  But realize that I just want to get into and out of the store and take care of my business just like everyone else.  You also aren’t the only one who is curious.  I avoid Wal Mart like the plague.  Why?  Because I can’t go five feet without someone stopping me.  I don’t want to be rude, but I’d rather it not take an hour to get a gallon of mile.  Also realize that a lot of us are chronically ill, and going out takes a lot more energy, and is more difficult for us than it is for you.

8) Do Not Take Pictures Without Asking:  We aren’t celebrities.  We are normal people, and snapping pictures without asking is creepy.  Oh, and yes, we see you do it.  Different handlers have different rules for allowing pictures.

9) Do Not Compare Us To Other Handlers:  This was said to me once, “Last week at Disney, someone with a service dog let us pet, so you have to do, too.”  Uhm…No I don’t.

10) Do Not Call More Attention to my Dog:  Just us being out brings attention.  We don’t need any help in that department.  Kids, I understand, but an adult yelling over and over: “LOOK! Its a DOG!” is likely to get the response, “LOOK! It’s a person!”

11) Do Not Attempt to Take my Dog’s Leash From Me:  No, really.  This has happened.  Just don’t.   You’ll likely evoke a violent response.

12) Treat the Dog like he’s/she’s a Wheelchair:  If you wouldn’t do it do a wheelchair, don’t do it to me/my dog.

13) Do NOT Remove the Dog from the Handler:  This is especially true if the handler is down.  The dog has a job to do, let them do it!

This part is going to be about annoying things said to handlers:

1) “Do you REALLY need him?”  Uhm…yeah.  I don’t like being the center of attention everywhere I go.

2) “When do you have to give him up?”   When the handler has an invisible disability, it is often assumed that we are training the dog for someone else.

3) “He’s getting gray.  He’s gonna die soon.”  That one was said to me, and my response, “Like you?” (was an older man).

4) “You can have one them dogs if your blind. She’s NOT blind.”

5) “You just don’t bring a dog into a place that serves food.”

6) “How in the HELL did you get that THING in here?” Through the front door.

7) “Oh, it must be nice to just throw a vest on your pet and bring them with you everywhere just for sympathy. I should try that..”  The response you get for this one will depend on the handler, but expect a lecture.

8) “How do I get a vest so I can take my dog everywhere?”  1) You get a disability.  2) You spend two years training a dog to do something that mitigates the disability, and training the dog to behave appropriately in public, or get on a waiting list, and wait two, or more, years for a program to train one for you.

9) “You don’t look disabled!”  Responses will vary, but common ones are, “You don’t look stupid.” “What does ‘disabled’ look like?” “Thank you, the day I look as sick as I am will be a very bad day.”

10) “Does he/she bite?”  I’ve come to learn that’s generally code for, “Can I pet?”  Let me answer that one, no he/she doesn’t, but the handler might.

I know that a lot of our responses can make us come off as rude or bitchy, and we don’t intend to be, but we are only human.  We are tired, busy, and over it.  If you get one of the ruder responses, you can about guarantee you aren’t the first person to approach that day.

Thank you to all the handlers that helped me make this list.

Relying on Four Legs

I think all service dog handlers have heard it.  We hear it from our friends.  We hear it from our family.  We hear it from strangers.  “Do you HAVE to bring him?” “Can you put him in the other room just until everyone leaves?” “You do NOT bring a dog into a place that has food.”  “Can you leave him at home, just this once?”  The list is endless, and no handler escapes it.  The response from the service dog handler is often short and is accompanied by a “Go to Hell” look that could kill everyone in the room if only that ability existed.  While looking back, we know it all stems from a lack of understanding.  People see our dogs as different, or embarrassing.  They know we will stand out, as do we, and they don’t want the attention our dogs draw when in a place that is not pet friendly.  What they don’t understand is that our dogs are why we can go out, why we can function and attend that gathering, why we can do anything that is normal.  We’ve also all given the above explanation, and it doesn’t seem to help, so I’ve going to describe what happened just last night.

Everyone that is familiar with me knows I have Harley.  He’s been part of me for quite a while now.  Harley is eleven years old now, so his successor is in the process of being trained to one day step up and fill his paws.  (I will never say take his place because no dog ever can take Harley’s place).  For now, she gives Harley a break.  Makeda has an amazing strong ability to alert.  She is also shockingly accurate. The ability to alert to neurological disabilities such as Seizures, Narcolepsy, and Syncope is not one that can be trained, but one the dog has to have the ability to do.  Makeda can and does do all three.

Now, for last night.  It was a little after 2am.  I was lying in bed, catching up on some DVR, and trying to convince my body it wanted to go to sleep.  It was not hearing me.  Harley was sound asleep in the living room, and Makeda comes in the bedroom.  She stands on her hind legs and puts her front legs across my chest like she’s holding me down.  This is how she alerts when I’m lying down.  Tim hears me fussing at her to get down.  I even told her, “I’m fine.”  He comes in the bedroom asks me how I’m feeling, and I said, “I’m fine.  I think she just wants attention.”  He came back with, “Yeah, you’ve said that before.”  We get Makeda down, and not three minutes later she’s back up, doing the same thing, but using more pressure to hold me down.  She also is focused on my left hand.  I have Complex Regional Pain Syndrome in my left hand and wrist.  It currently only acts up during, and just after, a seizure.  It is not at all uncommon for Makeda or Harley to focus on my left hand during an alert.  At this point I know she is serious.  This is a behavior she ONLY does during an alert.  She has never done a false alert.  I know better than to try to get up, so I call Tim in from the other room.  He sees what’s going on and gets me my meds.  Makeda watches me taking my meds, and gets off me, but stays right with me, sitting, and does not relax for approximately 15 minutes.  After 15 minutes, she relaxes, and goes and lays down on her bed.  I did not seize last night.

I know, with no doubt, that the only reason I did not seize last night is Makeda’s alert.  There is currently no technology that exists that can do what Makeda and Harley do.  Sometimes I can feel it coming on, but by then it’s too late. I’m going to seize, and the best thing I can do is “brace” for it.  Sometimes Tim can see “tells” that its going to happen, but, again, by that point, it’s too late to prevent it.  Every seizure does damage to my brain.  Every seizure wipes me out for the next three days.  In addition to my seizures, I have to deal with syncope and Narcolepsy with Cataplexy.  My dogs also alert to those events as well.  With all three, if I’m standing, I’m in serious danger of hitting my head on the way down or when I hit the floor.  Just as it is with seizures, there is no technology that exists that can do what Harley and Makeda do.  While I often have “tells” with them, you have to know me extremely well to see it as they are subtle, and its too late, I’m going down, and very quickly.

Events like last night are not uncommon at all.  Normally, they happen several days a week.  I have triggers like stress and changes in the barometric pressure that will make it more likely to occur.  Summer is my least stable time of year, and fall my most stable, but at no point am I immune.  On no day can I say with any certainty that I’m not going to have an episode.  I can literally go from feeling fine, laughing and joking, to down in a matter of seconds.   So, in order to keep myself safe, in order to be able to go out to dinner, meet with friends, have friends over, or do anything that is “normal”, anything that most people take for granted, I rely on four legs.  Earlier I described Harley as being “part of me,” and he very much is an extension of me, like a body part.  With time, Makeda will also become part of me.  Every service dog team, even with wildly different disabilities, is the same in this part.  Our dogs are a piece of us.  Without them, we are not safe.  Without them, we can not function at any level near normal.  We can live our lives because we rely on a set (or two) of four legs.

What’s with the zebra and the spoons?

I’m new to this whole blogging things, but after some encouragement from some friends, I thought I’d try it. So, to start out…What is with the zebra and what do I mean by spoons?

Here, the term zebra comes from the medical school phrase, “When you hear hoof prints, think horses not zebras.” It means when diagnosing a patient, they need to think the most common cause, the most likely, not the rare or unusual. The problem is that sometimes those hoof prints are made by zebras. The rare, the unusual, the not so well understood exist, and I’m one of them. I live with a complex of neurological disorders and the “gifts” given by them. My diagnosises include: Dysautonomia (both NCS and POTS), Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), Dystonia, Elhers Danlos Syndrome (EDS), An a-typical non epileptic seizure disorder, Narcolepsy, and Aspergers Syndrome.

The spoon analogy come from “The Spoon Theory”, which if you haven’t read, I encourage you to. It can be found here… http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/navigation/BYDLS-TheSpoonTheory.pdf

I have a service dog and an amazing significant other who is a great care taker. I have good days. I have bad days. I can be one hell of a smart ass when the mood strikes me. I also do disability advocacy work as I’m able. But, I take life one day at a time, doing what I can, when I can.

So, I guess this is a window into my messed up little head…Enjoy the view..