I hit a point in every prolonged absence from home where the excursion isn’t fun anymore and all I want is to sleep in my own bed, cook my own meals, and wear something that I haven’t pulled out of a backpack in the past week. This time last year, I was so there! and if I could’ve just gotten on a plane and taken “Juno” with me, I would have.

But we had important things to do…

We had the simulated traffic checks, which I already knew that “Juno” would pass with flying colours (she did). We sat for pictures, which was extra frustrating because the trainers guided us to the platform while another trainer situated our dogs, and then some of our dogs would lie down during the group picture rather than sit up. Photos are not a hill I will die on; so long as my dog is out of the way and behaving herself, I don’t care if she’s in the photo op. By the time photos were done, I was so frustrated that I went to my room, and then to the dining hall where I commiserated with my classmates who all had strong opinions on photo day.

After photos and lunch, we headed over to a local park to do some “doubles” work. This is where two guide dog teams practice walking together, alternating who’s in front, so that one dog isn’t always in the lead. This was one thing that Jenny was particularly stubborn about – she always had to be in front – but “Juno” doesn’t care so much about such things. Our doubles partner was not her class boyfriend; we all agreed they’d be too much of a distraction for each other. Instead, the class’ social butterfly was “Juno”‘s doubles partner… for a while at least.

I’m glad we’d switched to the leather harness from the Unifly. One thing I didn’t know was that this park was one of “Juno”‘s favourite running spots. The leather harness constricted her movements enough so that she couldn’t go flying around the park loop… but she wanted to! I hoped we could get a run in before we headed home…

After our invigorating power walk through the park, it was time for vet physicals. All the dogs got their checkups and weigh-ins, and then got taken for baths to make sure the giardia was gone. My girl came back to my room all shiny and clean, happy to be back with me, and out of nowhere got the zoomies! I’d never seen her so happy! I still wanted to go home, but the next day would be one of the highlights of guide dog school – New York City!

As usual, my alarm – whether it was internal or external – woke me well before park-feed-water-park time. So I put on a coffee and got some work done, because just laying in bed made my skin feel like it was going to itch.

“Juno” curled up under my desk while I did the things that needed to get done. I decided to move the mat from inside her crate to the spot under my desk so she’d be more comfortable, and she curled up like she’d been working under a desk for years. If I ever wondered how she’d handle going to the office, I didn’t anymore.

“Juno” HAD to potty, at a time long before anyone was available to pick up. So I picked up, lleft the bag in a space that was easy to find, and sent a text to the nursing staff so she could grab it for more tests. Because that morning, we still didn’t know what was going on with “Juno”, and the more data we had the better.

We hit a milestone in training one year ago today. Our first few walks were with the support leash – where a trainer holds one leash while I hold another. This was interesting for a dog I’d already discovered had boundary issues (do not crowd her, please!) but it’s an important part of the process; if things go sideways, someone who knows this dog well will be able to pull you back from the brink. But one year ago today, the metaphorical “training wheels” came off. I saw some of “Juno”‘s hard-headedness, particularly when it came to going to the bathroom in the rain that had started pouring that morning. I made the inevitable miscalculation of comparing her to Jenny. But to be honest, seeing her stubbornness made me feel more comfortable. I could work with stubborn; I could not work with a dog who just went la-di-da along with everything I did. But while both Jenny and “Juno” are stubborn, “Juno”‘s stubbornness had manners. She decided she was going to be maybe sort of kind of distracted by something, keeping far to the left of the sidewalk. Jenny would have been FULLY DISTRACTED by whatever “Juno” was interested in, and getting her out of that headspace could be a challenge; “Juno” asked politely if I’d reconsider my position on the thing that distracted her, and then moved on when she realized I would not.

Again, guide dog training is exhausting. And the rain didn’t make it more pleasant. When we came back to campus from the training centre, we were all ready to dry off and warm up.

They found me and “Juno” in the grooming room. “Juno” loves loves loves to be groomed; I discovered very early it’s one of her favorite things in the world. You’re brushing her and touching her and all she wants to do is lean into it and soak it up for all it’s worth. If they were looking for me, I knew they had her test results.

“Juno” tested positive for giardia. This is not surprising in any group of dogs in a congregate setting; my partner’s dog tested positive while he was in training as well, and I know they introduced the dogs at some point to see how they got along. Is it possible that my partner’s dog gave it to “Juno”? Maybe. Could it have come from somewhere else? Maybe. Did it really matter? Nope.

“Juno” got medications with every meal. There were two types of medications, one she would take for five days, and one she would take for ten. The dogs in class all got a special treat called a “meatball” with their supper to kill any potential parasites they may have been exposed to. One of my classmates cracked a joke over our supper that there was no blame for “Blondie” (“Juno”‘s class nickname) potentially giving everyone an STI (socially transmitted infection). I was too emotional to find it truly funny then, but looking back now, I can admit… it is kind of funny.

The one constant for me at guide dog school was the fatigue. Not the type of fatigue that a night’s sleep improves, but the physical and emotional exhaustion of constantly doing normal things in a new environment that’s more like boot camp (with a time change to boot!) and new people and a new dog who didn’t know me like my old dog and I just wanted to go home! Throw in an infection that while easy to treat can become chronic, and I was so very exhausted that very little could break me out of this funk.

But “Juno” did…

After ignoring all the toys in the toy box for two whole days, she decided that she wanted to play. And if I was sitting and stewing or working and not moving or paying attention to her… she would nudge me with a toy. If I still ignored her, or didn’t give her the play time she needed, she then decided the way to get my attention for real for real was to throw the toy at me. I didn’t know dogs could throw toys a foot in front of their faces, but she did! I started laughing… And then couldn’t stop.

And, again, after another long day with important steps forward, I thought that maybe it would all be OK.

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.

I had high hopes to sleep during my red-eye flight over most of the United States. The universe had other plans. I caught some snatches of sleep but was interrupted by turbulence and a screaming baby. When I disembarked the plane – no wheelchair that morning – I was cranky and exhausted and wondered what in the world I was doing.

I was met at the airport by a member of the Guiding Eyes staff and was directed to the baggage carousel. When I said I had my backpack and that was it, the response was surprise – this was something that would happen frequently over the next two weeks. But with no baggage to pick up, I was that much closer to my ride, a cup of coffee, and a nap, not necessarily in that order.

I was the first of my class – all four of us – to arrive at Guiding Eyes. I was directed to my room, where I promptly put down my backpack, sprawled out on the bed, and fell asleep for three hours. I connected to the wifi, sent a few emails, and then headed down the hall and up the ramp for lunch, where I met one of my classmates for lunch.

The first time training with a guide dog, I trained in my local environment, so any food that was prepared, I had to either make it myself or eat it in restaurants or coffee shops locally. For years I’ve heard amazing things about the food at guide dog school, and while I was fed and the food wasn’t bad, I felt disappointment that the food was… decent.

After lunch and a chat with my classmate, whose room was right beside mine, I went back to my room and waited for the Juno walk.. with a real dog! Maybe my real new dog?

The first introduction I had to “Juno” was her nose in my crotch. AWKWARD!!! I knew she was a yellow lab female, and that’s it. Everything I said during our entire walk was using the name “Juno” (a standard name used by guide dog schools to indicate a non-specific or – when a trainer is simulating a dog’s movements – a non-existent dog).

“Juno, forward.”

She was off like a rocket. She pulled like a tank.

“Juno, left.”

She took the turn smoothly at a wide angle; I was used to Jenny’s turn-on-a-dime style.

She was smart and quick and eager to please, and I was a teeeeeeensy bit smitten.

I learned very quickly with “Juno” that I’d let my body posture get sloppy. With Jenny, I could move in whatever ways I felt comfortable, and they’d communicate to her; Jenny and I knew each other. I could move my right wrist only slightly and she’d make a turn; “Juno” required fuller movements. Jenny didn’t mind my being right beside her; “Juno” required a bit more space. We tried different harness handles, and the walk was both exhausting and exhilarating, and I wanted more than anything for “Juno” to be my match.

After the “Juno” walk, as my other classmates arrived, we all settled in, ate dinner, and turned in early. I was exhausted. All I could think about was a smart yellow lab with inconsistent boundary issues, and how much I could sleep that night while I fretted about bonding with a new dog while Jenny hung out at home.

I need not have worried:

Dear diary…
I was so sad when my mom left yesterday without me and I don’t know where she went, and she wasn’t there this morning either.
Then my bestest friend came over and took me out for the day, we went to his house where I got tons of cuddles and belly rubs and played in the snow.
Then we went on another car ride and some long walks and went to a great coffee shop that serves puppuchinos, we met another friend and then went to a school where I met a bunch of small humans who thought I was awesome.
A little girl gave me liver treats and I showed her how well I could follow directions, and then we had a cuddle and a nap on the couch before I went home and played with my new little brother until we both had to lie down for a rest.
I still miss my mom, but sure have some great friends.
Is this called retirement ?
I was exhausted.