Robin DeBates And Brigadoon Service Dog “Nugget”
You know how when you live with a child or someone who is aging you don’t see the subtle changes because you’re with them every day? Living with a service dog feels kind of like that. The incremental changes add up slowly over time. There will be milestones. And eventually there will be a day when you look around and think, “Hey. I have a life. I feel good. This is really, really nice.”
One of the immediate things I noticed about living full-time with a service dog is that I was never alone. Humans, even with good intentions, have other tasks and needs to attend to. A service dog, however, has the primary function of paying attention to the human in the dog’s care.
Over time, that constant companionship turns into a form of reliability and trust. Learning how to read the dog’s body language has been instrumental in helping me retool my responses to the environment. For whatever reason, my brain thought it needed to stay on high alert almost if not all the time. I have learned how read my dog’s cues about whether or not a situation required me to be on alert, paying attention, or just present without needing to constantly scan for potential threats. Ratcheting down that adrenaline response allowed my brain to start focusing on other things, like getting better.
I also found that living with a service dog helped me to regulate my sleep-wake cycle, increase my physical activity, interact more with other people, and just plain leave the house more often. These things are all really key in regulating not just physical health, but emotional connection and social interaction, too.
Sometimes it can be really difficult, even still three and a half years later, to have a lot of people want to talk to, pet, and even, yes, feed the dog. Oh, and “access challenges” too… It requires a lot of patience and practice to feel skillful in being assertive yet calm in these situations, where someone is doing or saying something that is either out of your comfort zone or just plain wrong (i.e., refusing entry to their business because of the service dog). I think all this practice has helped me to get better at generally speaking up in situations that feel uncomfortable. The more I practice managing myself, even though my heart is pounding, the more reliable I know my responses will be… and having a wonderfully soft fluffy love dog to pet through all of it helps regulate and recover, as well.
Living with a service dog is definitely a full-time, life changing commitment. It makes me visible as a person with a disability in a way that I otherwise would not be visible. It generates comments, some positive and some negative. It changes, in some ways, the types of employment I will have because realistically, I am not willing to work anywhere that does not want the team of me and my service dog. And the fur… it’s a better side effect than the side effects I got from prescription medications, but the fur is ubiquitous. And totally worth it.
