In an ideal world, I would have started this blog six months ago. I would have chronicled the application process, the evaluations, and my hesitation about committing to a new way of living. But alas, the road to Nowhere is paved with good intentions. But I’ve journaled most of my major life experiences in some form or other, and a quest of this magnitude certainly needs to be chronicled. Even if nobody else reads the story, I’m sure it will be useful to look back on a few years down the road.

So, the story so far. I had been considering a guide dog for a couple years now. For many blind and partially sighted people, the greatest promise of a guide dog lies in increased mobility. For me, this isn’t the primary motivation, although I think I’ll be surprised and impressed by the mobility assistance the dog will bring me that I’m at this point not even aware I needed. Instead, the deciding factor for me was emotional. This isn’t really the time or place for me to launch into a deep psychological self-examination, although I will try to relate things I’m learning throughout my training to my past experiences. Suffice it to say that I deal with issues of trust, attachment, leadership, and relationship. I’m not expecting a guide dog to be my panacea, some sort of miracle cure. Much as I’d like to, I’ve come to disbelieve in quick fixes. But my little experience with the guide dog process, even now, has shown me that the experience will provide me with a great opportunity to work on all these facets of my life.

After deciding I was ready for a dog, the next step was to choose an organization where I’d train and through whom I’d get my dog. There are actually several guide dog companies throughout the country, and while they’re all similar they also have important key differences. I won’t go into the ins and outs of my research here, though I’d be happy to share my thoughts at some point. Through word-of-mouth and my own investigation, I decided to apply to Guide Dogs for the Blind (GDB), based in San Rafael just outside of San Francisco. Judging from my interactions with them thus far, I feel confident I made the right choice.

Then there was the application process, which should have been simple, but like so many other things in my life I made it needlessly complicated. Mostly I just dragged my feet on assembling the requisite medical records. But once my heart and mind was made up, everything fell into place. That’s just how the world works.

Part of the application process involved an extensive home evaluation and mobility assessment. A trainer from GDB’s Portland, Oregon campus asked me a battery of questions about my routine, my energy level, and long-term life goals. We then hit the road for a mobility evaluation and simulated “Juno” walk, which simply means that the trainer holds the dog-end of a harness while I hold the handle and leash to get a feel for what working with a guide dog feels like. All commands on this simulated walk are addressed to Juno; for instance, “Juno, right,” “Juno, forward.”

It was on this walk that I caught a glimpse of the life lessons a guide dog can teach me. Part of the challenge for a partially-sighted person like me in working with a guide dog is that I will inevitably use what little sight I have to second-guess my dog’s judgement. In an effort to curtail this tendency, the trainer had me do some occlusion training, which is just a fancy way of saying she made me walk with my eyes closed. To me, this is akin to those clich scenes in movies in which people do a “trust fall” from some height into the waiting arms of his or her companions. Trusting Juno with my eyes closed was at first very difficult, but even in the brief time it took us to walk home I found myself relaxing and becoming more comfortable with letting the “dog” be my eyes. In follow-up discussions with GDB instructors I’ve asked for some blindfold work during my training.

Records sent and evaluation complete, I simply had to wait, which I’m not necessarily very good at. Around late October, GDB admissions called to inform me that I had been accepted and was guaranteed a place in the class beginning January 5th. Since then, supporting materials like plane tickets and lecture CDs have been trickling in. Now the time has come to start packing!