(if you follow me on Facebook, you've already read some of this. In addition to my regular newsletter material, I will also be sharing the a series about my young service dog Know Me, including how I came to have a service dog, the dogs that came before him, how he came into my life, and bits about his training. This is episode 1)

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There are a lot of different steps involved in partnering with a service dog, but the very first place you’ve got to put your feet is into the world of disability.

That’s where things get squishy. My history of disability is a story spoken backward. I have had intractable and hemiplegic migraines since infancy, most likely since birth, but I was born at time when that diagnosis was not available, and so I grew up thinking I that my experience was a weird conglomerate of attention seeking, laziness, and trouble speaking.

Our family lore has it that I visited the emergency room of every state, every country we traveled to, and we were nearly nomadic, there were a lot of these stops. I was as comfortable with doctors and blood draws as I was with airports and highway rest stops. Stuffed full of antibiotics for suspected ear infections and mystery bugs, I was presumed normal, just not trying hard enough.

Dogs have been part of me almost as long as disability. It is fitting and prophetic that the very first dog book I owned, found in the free book box at the recycling center, was The New Knowledge of Dog Behavior. In the mid 1960s it was cutting edge information about dogs and it was all about the development of guide dogs too. I couldn’t read yet, but my sister read it to me over and over. I didn’t have a dog yet, I wouldn’t for quite some time.

Stamp, my twelfth dog, alerted to migraines before they started. The ADA was barely a decade old, few people knew what to make of medical alert dogs, and even though I knew he was helping me out a lot, I felt immediately fraudulent the few times I put a vest on him and took him out in public. The dog community agreed, if we were traveling with our competition dogs as service dogs, they must be ‘fake’, and if we appeared to be able bodied, clearly we were. That was that.

Advocacy is not easy. For all talk of individualism, we fundamentally long for belonging. It’s almost impossible to describe being different because people want to feel that they know what it’s like to feel like you feel, to experience your experience, to be like you are.

Migraines come in all flavors, forms and levels, much like injuring a foot can range from a blister to amputation.

It was See Ya who was the tipping point, the dog who stepped into the role of service dog as I stepped in and out of hospitals with greater frequency.

So many of you friends, Facebook friends, and others who have seen See Ya with me for years have probably wondered what exactly she does for me, and why I need her. Unlike someone who is visually impaired, my disability is not immediately apparent. Fun fact, even though my students and other dog people generally don’t experience me with See Ya, virtually the ONLY times she’s not with me are when I am teaching or actively running a dog in competition. So it might seem as though she doesn’t work much, but it’s quite the opposite.

See Ya let’s me know, well before I would realize it, that a migraine is coming on, allowing me to take preventative medication. That can’t be taught per se, but quite a few dogs are aware of these things. Alerts seem so simple but they go against the grain of everything we usually want. She has to get my attention, sometimes, often even, when I am sleeping or quite distracted. She has to be persistent and persuasive even when I push her away or ignore her. And having learned that skill, to wake me up and get my full attention, she cannot abuse the power.

She picks up things I drop, finds my phone, my keys, my wallet. She helps me get up if I stumble. She calms me when I have attacks of anxiety. She alerts before I have an anxiety attack and prevents them. She finds where I parked my car. She finds family members and brings them to me. She helps me with grounding. She retrieves my medication.

There is a lot of angst around service dogs, particularly in the dog sport community. Apparently, if you are ‘well’ enough to run agility, or some other sport, you clearly are not disabled enough to need a service dog. If your dog is talented enough to qualify for National events, that’s proof enough that it should not be allowed to fly with you and be of assistance. Because it seems to be beyond the mental reach of some people that a dog might possibly be able to both run agility and be a service dog, and that a person might both be a talented competitor and have disabilities.
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See Ya does so many things for me, and now that she’s retiring, Know Me is learning the ropes.

There's a lot less uncertainty with each dog trained. Everything is easier, faster, smoother. Everything falls into place nearly effortlessly. Well, no, not really, but it feels that way because the hurdles are expected and easy to overcome, there are no problems, only fun challenges.

The basic skills of See Ya's puppy training were documented in a series for Clean Run Magazine titled Puppy Skills for Total Team Performance which ran monthly from January to December 2016.

Know Me's puppy training was documented for the Picture Perfect Puppy and Even More Perfect online classes which give puppies and their people the skills they need for future excellence in any endeavor.