My mornings started early. Like, off the charts early. Like, 3:00 AM in Alberta early. This was both by choice and by necessity. I couldn’t seem to get a full night’s sleep, so I might as well embrace it and get some work done while I had the brainpower and time to do it. This had the added benefit of giving my brain something to focus on while I was busy doom spiraling and awfulizing in my head.

In truth, I had little to complain about. I had a nice dog that worked hard, loved her job, and made me work for her affection. She was self-contained enough to hang out in her crate – door open, by choice – but was just as content to curl up under the desk at my feet while I typed away on my laptop and drank a cup of coffee before taking “Juno” outside when it was late enough for someone to pick up after her.

Yup… you read that right. The first week of guide dog school had school staff picking up poop. This was a hard thing for me on one hand it seemed kind of strange and infantilizing, and besides it was hard to undo the habit of almost ten years of daily poop pick up. But transitions are hard and scary times for these dogs, and one way dogs show either stress or health concerns is through their poop, so it did make a certain amount of sense for a neutral third party to be able to keep tabs on things. As I found out later, this would be important.

Guide dog training is both highly technical and highly boring to write about. What I will say is that it’s absolutely exhausting. You repeat and repeat and repeat things, slowly building on the thing you did a few minutes ago. I walked 4 km one year ago today with “Juno”, something I could do on a given day without thinking twice about it. But even though these walks were broken up into 30-45 minute training sessions at a time, and even though those were broken up into segments with explanations of what my new dog was doing or waiting for traffic to stop or comments about how sloppy my guide form had gotten over the years (my words, not my trainer’s!), and between sessions I could take a break and have a snack or read a book or do some homework while my trainer was working with one of my classmates, I was exhausted by mid-afternoon. Probably because I was wide awake at 5:00 AM in New York…?

At lunchtime, I took “Juno” for a “park” (AKA a bathroom break). One of the trainers watched through the window in case she needed to do poop pickup. She did. She mentioned briefly to me that she saw some blood and was a little concerned. She scooped the poop and brought it back in the van so it could be tested when we got back to the Guiding Eyes campus. We didn’t get test results back that day.

Once we were done for the day – we were always back by 3:00 PM or so – I would nap. Or read. Or snuggle a Labrador who seemed so disinterested in the box full of toys in the room. At supper, she walked on leash with me to the dining hall, and I sat with my classmate whose room was beside mine. “Juno” and her dog had developed a very cute bond in the van that day, but during supper it was important to keep the dogs from misbehaving.

After supper, my classmate and I decided to see what kind of games we could find in Alumni Hall. My class was comprised of four students – two women about the same age, and two men about the same age (twenty years or so older than the women). We invited the guys to join us for games, but they declined. I brought “Juno” with me to Alumni Hall, in truth because she was so gassy I didn’t want her to stink up my room! My classmate brought her dog with her, too. “Juno” decided to take a bone from the box in the corner of Alumni Hall; if all she felt up to was chewing a bone while we played Scrabble or Uno or whatever, that was fine with me. My classmate’s dog was perfectly behaved until they decided that THEY wanted “Juno”‘s bone. This dog frog-walked under the table and got right in front of “Juno”, and stole the bone right from her mouth. And what did “Juno” do?

NOTHING!

For about ten minutes.

And then she snuck under the table, and stole that bone back!

Once that happened, it was ON! We called it a night when the dogs started getting rowdy, partially because “Juno” wasn’t feeling great, and partly because we didn’t know our dogs well enough to objectively gauge how they’d react in a given play scenario. They’d get plenty of playtime later, but tonight was not that night.

I walked back to my room, laughing at the antics of the dogs, worried about my girl, and yet oddly confident that everything would be OK.