When I realised I have an assistance dog (in training)

A couple of weeks ago, we were supposed to visit my granny who lives about 6 hours drive from us. But my parents were still recovering from covid and my mum now has long covid, so we couldn’t go because neither were well enough to drive that far. I was actually the healthiest out of the lot of us for a change!

Anyway, Hamish was booked into kennels for the time we were away because we thought the drive might be a bit far for him at this stage of training. When we cancelled our trip, we decided to send him there for a couple of nights anyway, because it’s actually not a bad idea to give him that time interacting with other people and dogs, and learning how to settle if we’re not around eg if I’m in hospital.

This meant I was at home doing my normal routine but Hamish wasn’t around. It was weird. It was strange for everyone and the house was quiet, but more so for me. Until now, I hadn’t realised the impact Hamish’s very small amount of assistance dog training is having on my life. I’ve been telling people that he’s “not that useful yet, since he can’t do many tasks”. Which he can’t. But the ones he can do, seem to be making a difference!

The most obvious impact he has, is his company for me. Any untrained/unskilled animal can be company for a human, and there’s no doubt that animals are good for people’s mental health. Having something depend on you for their food, exercise and general needs means you have to motivate yourself to look after them. That doesn’t make them an assistance dog though. At some point I’ll train Hamish to do deep pressure therapy which will help reduce my heart rate, but we’re not there yet. He does, however, help my disability more than his presence alone would help anyone else. If I’m feeling wound up or stressed, I’ll go and sit next to Hamish because his presence has a calming influence on me. Which does directly help my disability because my entire illness revolves around the fact that my body doesn’t make enough of the stress hormone, cortisol. My counsellor and I have been working on grounding techniques, some of which involve Hamish specifically, which I obviously couldn’t do when Hamish wasn’t here. It’s been a while since I had a meltdown, but I cried a lot the second day he wasn’t here. Not because I was missing him specifically, it was because I got annoyed at the passport office and couldn’t do my normal things to help myself.

Hamish has been trained to find help from my parents if I suddenly have issues. I say to him “find bert” (for example) and he knows he has to run as fast as he can to find my dad and nudge him with his nose. Then my parents tell him to “find isobel” and he brings them back to me. I taught him this because shouting for my parents didn’t work the last time I needed an ambulance, even though both were in the house, because they couldn’t hear. Dogs have better hearing though, so I have a code phrase I can shout so Hamish comes running to me (he can do this even if he’s asleep) and then I can send him to my parents. He can open most of the doors himself too.

Before I’d taught him this, I was having to walk around the house with my injection kit and my phone on me all the time, so I could either inject myself or ring for help. This is because I have a tendency to fracture and dislocate things easily eg scratching my head and those kinds of things can kill me. Aside from it being annoying carrying all those things around all the time, it’s a lot of mental load. It means I’m constantly on high alert and risk assessing things to keep myself safe. Having Hamish in the house means I can turn a small part of my brain off, which makes a lot of difference mentally but also helps my illness because having to always be in fight or flight mode triggers my adrenal insufficiency. Eventually, he’ll be trained to get things for me like my meds, injection, my phone, a bottle of water, food… which will give me even more freedom. So far he can only bring me socks which isn’t very useful!!

However, the biggest thing I realised by him not being here is how often he gives me alerts for my adrenal insufficiency. We’ve just started scent work training formally, but I now can see how often he was giving me untrained alerts. You’ve probably seen the videos of assistance dogs nudging or pawing their handler when they’re giving an alert, but I’ve learnt recently that before they’re trained to shape their alert into something like that, they do “odd” things like stare/fixate at you, paw or burrow the ground, whine, bark or cry a lot for no reason or jump up and mouth you. A lot of those, can also be put down to a dog being badly behaved, but it’s when they happen out of character for your reasonably well trained dog that they’re more likely to be alerts.

Hamish burrows the ground or scratches a very specific place in the hallway when he’s trying to alert me. I’ve only worked this out recently because I just thought he was being a pain so would send him to his den and then we’d sit in the kitchen together because he’d usually do it at the same time every day, right when I was due some pills and I didn’t want to chase him. If I didn’t, he’d usually just keep scraping the wall. What I didn’t realise, is me trapping him in the kitchen meant I was sitting down and calming down too, and I’d get a drink, eat something and take my pills early, so I was accidentally doing what I needed to to stop feeling ill.

The other thing I now realise he does is he comes and stands in front of me and stares intensely at me, which I know now is a form of an alert. I thought it meant he wanted something, so I’d open the door to see if he needed to wee, check his water bowls, put some food in his bowl… and we’d usually end up sitting in the kitchen, getting a drink and a snack etc Or I’d think “I feel weird now I’ve stood up, maybe I need more steroids”. So he was giving me an alert, which prompted me into action. He doesn’t alert me every single time and it’s normally only once I’ve got recognisable symptoms, and I spend all day ignoring them usually. But because I thought he needed something to start off with when he did it, I was also prompted into thinking about what I needed.

Turns out him being “a pain” was giving me a fair few alerts during the day. (Side note: sometimes he is just being a pain!) His time away from me made me notice the difference between when he’s just being an annoying dog and when he’s trying to tell me something.

In a way, Hamish going to kennels was a bit of a blessing in disguise. It’s made me realise how amazing his (currently very few) assistance dog tasks actually are and how big an impact on my life he’s already had. It’s also given me the chance to reflect on our training progress and how we can work together even more effectively. I knew he was a very smart, very cute dog before, but now I know it for definite!

I climbed a flight of stairs!

I’ve found stairs hard for about 4 years since I started fracturing my feet. My preferred choice of getting up them was on all fours. And I haven’t been able to get up them at all since I fractured my pelvis in November 2021. Until yesterday!

I didn’t really have much choice- I needed an eye test and the opticians only has rooms upstairs and no lift. I live in a bungalow so the most amount of stairs I’ve had to deal with are the 2 or 3 steps you find at building entrances.

Stairs are *hard* for me. With my feet fractures, if I can’t go up using my hands and feet, I have to go up them one at a time worst foot first, so both feet are on a step at the same time. With my pelvis, it was a similar way with dodgy side first, which caused issues if my foot fracture was on the opposite side to my pelvis, which it was at one point. Plus I’m not really supposed to put weight through my left shoulder in case it spontaneously dislocates, so I can’t rely on my crutches too much with the stairs to pull myself up. Then there’s the fact that that type of exertion makes me really tachycardic, which makes me feel like I’m going to pass out, sweating, shaking, out of breath… I used to only do them if I absolutely had to and didn’t even bother trying for the last 18 months.

We got half steps added to the front of our house so I could vaguely get out when things were really bad. And more recently I’ve been able to manage the larger back steps with only risking my life slightly (!) when the front door got stuck and I had to get out somehow! So I thought I’d give it a go at the opticians.

And I smashed it! I used 1 crutch and the hand rail and took my time, letting other people go past rather than trying to rush. I even managed to do it like normal people ie 1 foot, 1 step, and I didn’t have too many black spots in front of my eyes when I got to the top.

Today my lower back hurts and my legs are stiff but I can still move without my crutches. So I’m taking this as a huge achievement! I think I’ll still take the lift every chance I get though 😉

Going to a Dog Show

One of the events I have to take my dog to as part of his assistance dog training for our training course is a dog show. It’s part of the exposure/socialisation module to show that your dog is comfortable around a lot of other dogs, people and with lots of activity going on. We found a fun dog show at an animal sanctuary and took him here. He went as a pet dog rather than in his assistance dog vest because the point of the exercise was so he could be sociable around other dogs and not in working mode where he has to be focussed and ignore everything.

I don’t know how anyone takes their dog to Crufts, it must be an absolute nightmare! It reminded me a bit of when I took year 7s to the big choir concerts where hundreds of kids go to perform together in an arena, all from different schools. It’s organised chaos. It’s good fun but you have to be alert and paying attention to everything the whole time.

We got there and the first thing Hamish wanted to do was go for a wee. I tried to direct him to an appropriate place eg the verge at the edge of the car park, but he chose a nice looking flower bed near the entrance for the whole world to see. It was him marking his territory because there were so many other dogs around who had probably done the exact same thing. Lesson learnt- be quicker with the “leave it” command when we get out the car!

You had to register before the show started so my dad went off to do that while Hamish, my mum and I sat in the cafe and ordered some lunch. Hamish settled pretty quickly and without needing something to do (chew toy or chew stick) which I was pretty happy about but I gave him a treat stick anyway because I wanted to encourage this behaviour in the future. He started off wanting to go say hi to every dog that walked past, and there were a lot because we were sat in the corridor. But he didn’t growl or bark or whine, I just had to have hold of his harness to make sure (more for my peace of mind than anything). Once he’d settled down though he just laid on the floor with a slack lead while we ate. I’d brought food and water for him, and a bone, treat sticks and a toy, just in case.



The dog show was part of a fun day raising money for the animal charity, so we had a look around on our way to the dog show enclosure. I let him do a lot of sniffing but kept him walking on and said “leave it” so he didn’t mark every tree and flower bed by weeing on it. I had to remind him a lot not to pull on his lead because he wanted to sniff everything but he eventually settled down. We got to the dog show bit early, which turned out to be a good thing because it meant we stood at the side and watched all the other people and dogs come in.

He greeted most of the other dogs politely, by giving their bum or nose a good sniff and only had a brief snarl/growl at some of them and responded really well to me saying “leave it”. Despite there being a lot of barking and whining from all the other dogs he didn’t bark or whine back. He was showing some signs of anxiety to start with- head down, ears down, stiff posture- but eventually calmed down and actually quite enjoyed being around a lot of dogs. There were a lot of children there, who he normally gets really excited about seeing, but he was really good at ignoring them and letting them walk past without bothering them. Besides his tail getting his happy wag going, he didn’t react at all.

We decided to enter him into two classes for fun: “young and fabulous” and “quickest sniffer”. I’d never been to a dog show as a spectator, let alone with a dog so I had no idea how it worked. You get given a number to attach to you like runners in races do, and then when they call your number, you go into the event ring. We had to line up along the back fence and say why we thought our dog was fabulous to the commentator, who had a microphone. Most people said “because they give the best cuddles” which was a bit of a cop out, and some people had brought their kids into the paddock, probably it help the cute factor- who can turn down cute kids with a cute puppy? Meanwhile, I had my dad with me. So we definitely weren’t going to win any cute points!

We said that he was going to be my assistant dog as our fabulous reason. The judges came round and talked to us and asked the same thing and to judge how cute the puppies were for themselves. Then they announced the top two for each heat who then went on into the final. In the end, a Dalmatian puppy won, who was seriously cute so I’m not surprised he took the title!

By this point both me and Hamish were feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the dogs and people and noise. He’d never ever been anywhere with that much going on all in one place, and I hadn’t been since pre-covid. So we both needed a bit of time away from it, a wee (!), and a snack. Then we went back to do the quickest sniffer category.

Hamish is normally really good at this. We call it “find it” where you hide a treat/treats and then he has to sniff out where they are. At dog class, he has to sniff around lots of identical cones and sit to indicate which one has it under. Then I lift the cone and he gets to eat it when I say “ok”. He nearly always gets it right and is really controlled when he does it ie he doesn’t just randomly sniff or run around or snatch the food.

Not at the dog show though! The enclosure where they were doing the events was on sand. Hamish *loves* the beach. Last year when we were on holiday and dogs weren’t allowed on the beach, he had a bit of a demented rebellion after slipping his collar and rampaged on the sand. His escapades at the dog show were pretty similar! As soon as I let him off the lead, he was off. The treats hidden in boxes were not as exciting for him as the sand. And he had the whole place to himself! Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t crowned the quickest sniffer, but he made the crowd laugh (which encouraged him even more!) and he really enjoyed himself!



As well as the events/categories, they had arts and crafts and stalls you could buy from. Hamish did amazingly, especially with how many other dogs had been in the tent with the stalls, and the amount of dog food/treats being sold in a confined space. He didn’t remotely try to snaffle anything and patiently waited while I looked at things.

There was a taster session of doggy parkour which was run by our very first dog trainer. I was really impressed she recognised and remembered Hamish’s name, and even more impressed he remembered who she was. He did his smile and jumped around in excitement. Parkour is where you use every day surfaces or constructions like buildings, benches and walls to show off some kind of gymnastics/acrobatics. For dogs, it seems to be a case of you get to jump on a lot of things you’d not usually be allowed to. Hamish loved it, so I’m going to see if there are workshops he can go to.

Apart from a bit of rain, we had a fab day. We lasted a lot longer time-wise than I expected to because I thought Hamish might start to get grumpy or overwhelmed but he didn’t. Once he’d got over his initial excitement of there being dogs everywhere, he settled down and was a confident, happy dog, which was the goal we wanted to achieve. We didn’t win any prizes, and I’m not planning on entering him into any serious dog shows, but I reckon we’d definitely go to some fun dogs shows again. Because it was s fun day!

Learning to play piano (again)

Now that my bathroom’s finished (blog post soon), the room it adjoins to isn’t a building site anymore, meaning I could start to get some of my stuff out of storage, at least until we start converting it. One of these things is my electric piano. It’s over 20 years old and has been in a barn for about 2 years and, by some miracle, it still works!

I pretty much stopped playing musical instruments when I left my job as a music/performing arts teacher 8 or 9 years ago. Every time I played anything, I ended up in hospital soon after- it was just too much energy, and I was really close to dying most days at that point just by existing (although I didn’t know that at the time). Playing piano had less potential for me going to hospital than wind and brass instruments (less energy), so I’d play bits here and there, but I completely stopped playing when I started fracturing my wrists and dislocating my shoulder. Then I moved back to Cumbria and haven’t had access to a piano until now. I was never amazing but I was competent. I could play well enough to accompany pupils and work out chords and melodies quickly enough on the spot to get kids enthused with whatever the current cool song was (Dappy on the glockenspiel was one of my best efforts)

Although I have the piano back, I don’t have any of my sheet music because I have no idea what box it’s in without going for a proper rummage and creating more chaos. If I expected kids to be able to play the stuff I was teaching them in year 7 keyboard skills without them having ever played before, I figured that would be a good starting point for me. And it’s forever etched in my brain after teaching it so much.

I quickly realised that I have zero strength in my left arm. That’s my weakest side, it’s the side I fractured my wrist once, I’ve had sore tendons in my arm/wrist there for as long as I remember and that’s the shoulder I keep dislocating and subluxing. I put myself on finger strengthening exercise and stopped as soon as it started hurting, which was usually after about a minute. I was paying a lot of attention to my left hand, making sure I was getting even tone and dynamics. With the keyboard skills term, the point was to get them playing with all 5 fingers without them having to change their hand position, making finger strength even more obvious. I noticed my right hand wasn’t doing too well either, which I found odd so I decided to see if muscle memory would kick in and played an easy piano piece I learnt as a child.

Light bulb moment- I hadn’t been playing properly before. I’d been using my wrists to get power through, my fingers weren’t very good at pushing down the keys. It was all coming from my wrist. Playing my “old” way with my wrists made my left side hurt a lot more quickly (seconds rather than a minute) but my right hand playing was pretty much like it used to be, with a few wrong notes. How on earth had I spent years banging on at the kids about finger exercises and hand position and not realised I was doing it wrong?!

My theory is, if I have to learn how to play piano again, I may as well do it properly. And I might also prevent future injury which would be a bonus. A similar thing happened with my clarinet playing, so I think it must be from having taught myself both from quite young and no one noticing poor technique. With my clarinet, I got to my university auditions and the lecturer said “ooooo you play double lipped, that’s interesting”, which is how I found out I’d been playing differently to most people by accident (you’re supposed to rest your top teeth on the mouthpiece, I was tucking my top lip over my teeth and then resting both on the mouthpiece). It’s because I taught myself and things like TikTok and YouTube weren’t around then, so as far as I was concerned, if I could make a noise, it was fine and my clarinet teachers didn’t seem to notice. I had to completely relearn when I got to uni though, which was hard changing 8 years of (bad) habits.

The difference being with the clarinet and the piano is that I’m not a university standard pianist having to relearn like I was then. It’s been years since I’ve played piano so I’d be rusty anyway. There’s also something quite freeing about playing when you know fine well you’re rubbish. There’s no expectations so you can focus on enjoying it rather than mourning over what you “should” be able to do. Plus I can’t find my music so I’m just playing whatever I can remember or work out by ear.

Somebody at my sewing class was telling me she uses an app to learn piano- it’s amazing what apps can do! None of this existed while I was still teaching. Now I feel old…! My goal is to play what I like as pain free as possible. And if I can do that, I’ll call my new venture into correct piano playing technique a success