[nagdu] What trainers don't know

Tamara Smith-Kinney tamara.8024 at comcast.net
Tue Apr 19 19:37:31 UTC 2011 

Oh, thanks for doing my homework for me!  My dirty little secret is that I
am presently so technologically challenged that the friends who used to call
me to look things up for them on the internet now call me to tell me about
things they looked on the internet.  Which is cool, because I get to learn
about stuff it used to be I would have looked up.  Also I feel validated
about all those times I assured them they were truly clever enough to use
the internet themselves no matter how many times they insisted otherwise.
People are funny, but most of them are pretty wonderful.  Especially when
they keep me from being completely clueless.  /lol/

Having two wandering eyes instead of just one can't be an improvement when
it comes to vision, even if the eyes themselves see just fine.  Then there
are the social implications as he grows up and starts school, unless they
get it fixed enough the other kids won't notice and do what kids do.
/shudder/  I had a friend with a wandering eye in our early grade school
years, when it was much less easy to correct without a number of surgeries
over a number of years.  His everyday life at school was probably not a
whole lot less unpleasant than the surgeries or the struggle to read and do
schoolwork.  He was always a really decent, intelligent, good-natured kid,
and I enjoyed his friendship over that of kids who bullied him enough to
take the bits I got for hanging with him.  Didn't think about it as a moral
choice or anything like back then, it just seemed like the natural thing to
do.  Huh.  He tragically never got the chance to grow up, and I still miss
him and feel pretty sad about that.

The medical knowledge and technology exists now for this present-day kiddo
to have a chance at having things put right where they went wrong and to
have the original problem corrected as well before he faces his peers in the
classroom.  It's not the notion he may be blind that I worry about -- we've
all done it and it works for us! -- but the other kids.  And, if he does
need education to cope with some degree of blindness, the State of Oregon
made some decisions a couple of years back in order to guarantee he almost
certainly won't get it.  Yup.  They paved the Oregon School for the Blind
and put up a parking lot.  So parents of blind children have been just
packing up and moving out of state so their kids can learn to read.  The
parents of children with additional disabilities are in a real bind because
the rest of the social safety net is so torn and jammed up with hooks that
they can't pull together the resources to move.  But we do have a nice new
parking lot now, so that's the important thing.

Anyway, I hope the best for the parents and the child himself.  I also hope
that the professionals involved in the, er, minor loss of sense of
direction, end up taking responsibility even if it takes a judge to make
them do so, so the child is not dealing with the consequences of their minor
lack of perfection all by himself.

Which reminds me that I need to get busy and get some things done.  I'm
mentally drafting a letter to the local news stations with a suggestion this
might be a perfect time for them to put their investigative reports to work
on a story about the closing of the School for the Blind, the consequences
to children and families because of that, and the abuse the youngsters are
likely to face at the Oregon Commission for Blind when they go for summer
training sessions there.  Which I got to witness for myself less than a year
ago, but telling people about it around here doesn't get much in the way of
concern.  

But I did get to test my training and strategy for potential vicious dog
attack with Mitzi to keep us from getting hurt by the melee when social
workers started shoving the whole lot of that year's kids around.  Could not
believe it.  But I hear we need that agency now more and ever, so we don't
want to rock the boat...

Maybe the local news will be happy to take this opportunity to do some boat
rocking their way?

Tami Smith-Kinney

-----Original Message-----
From: nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
Of Sarah Clark
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2011 10:40 AM
To: NAGDU Mailing List,the National Association of Guide Dog Users
Subject: Re: [nagdu] What trainers don't know

Hi Tami,
I looked it up after you first posted. I read that the boy was having 
surgery for a wandering right eye, and the doctor first did the surgery on 
the left eye before realizing her error.  And the mother is saying that now 
as far as she can tell, the left eye is now wandering, and the right one 
doesn't seem to have improved.  The boy is only 4, and she's concerned about

the impact this may have on his vision in the future.

Sarah



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tamara Smith-Kinney" <tamara.8024 at comcast.net>
To: "'NAGDU Mailing List,the National Association of Guide Dog Users'" 
<nagdu at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2011 10:11 AM
Subject: Re: [nagdu] What trainers don't know


> I'll let you know the follow up when more information is available.  This
> all happened yesterday or the day before, so the evening news story was 
> more
> about the emotional/shocking side of it than the practical.  They did
> dutifully toss in some quotes from the doctor and the hospital
> administration, so the news there is that we can't expect them to be 
> perfect
> all the time and if sometimes that means sticking a sharp knife in some
> kid's good eye because you lost your sense of direction, then you just 
> have
> to learn to suck it up and quit whining about it.  We got around to the
> other eye in the end, didn't we?  /lol/  The family has contacted a 
> lawyer,
> so that part of the story does make sense.
>
> Glad I was able to communication something or other about guide dogs 
> before
> I got rabies from listening to the news.  /smile/
>
> Tami Smith-Kinney
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
> Of Sheila Leigland
> Sent: Monday, April 18, 2011 8:19 PM
> To: NAGDU Mailing List, the National Association of Guide Dog Users
> Subject: Re: [nagdu] What trainers don't know
>
> That was interesting and I think I basicly understood what you were 
> getting
> at. Now I think we want to know about what happens to this kid.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tamara Smith-Kinney <tamara.8024 at comcast.net>
> Sent: Monday, April 18, 2011 8:11 PM
> To: 'NAGDU Mailing List, the National Association of Guide Dog Users'
> <nagdu at nfbnet.org>
> Subject: Re: [nagdu] What trainers don't know
>
> Tracy,
>
> Well stated.  The division of duties amongst various staff and volunteers
> over the course of a guide dog's young life is necessary for any program
> producing a quantity of quality dogs while maintaining a functioning
> business structure to support their ongoing activities.  It's an 
> inevitable
> result of that necessity that no one individual has a truly comprehensive
> knowledge of every pertininent detail of every single dog, even the
> dauntingly small percentage of pups that successfully complete the 
> training
> and go on to successful careers as guides.  When you're contemplating
> training your own dog for the first time, which means you get one shot and
> are hopting therefore for a 100 percent success rate, the statistics from
> the programs are downrighht terrifying.  /smile/  There are enough
> differences between your circumstances and theirs that the correlation is 
> in
> no way direct or even statistically relevant.  At that point in the
> owner-trainer process, though, it is impossible not to be painfully aware
> that a key point of difference between them and you is that they know what
> they're doing.  And you don't.  /lol/
>
> Having done it, I've come to recognize many of the advantages of working
> with a signle dog that is my own dog to train for my own use which 
> increased
> my chances of success enough that I did, in fact, end up with a working
> guide despite the apparent odds at the outset.
>
> Er...Whatever else I was going to add to pull that together and make it 
> make
> some sort of sense is now gone due to the report on the news about a kid 
> who
> had his wrong eye operated on, so the doctor just finished up that surgery
> and went ahead to operate on the eye she was supposed to...  Her 
> explanation
> to the child and his parents when he came out of anesthesia included the
> phrase, "I lost my sense of direction."  Um....  What I didn't get from 
> the
> report, which means I now have to listen again in case I missed it somehow
> -- or something like that -- is whether this means he is now blind in both
> eyes instead of just the one or what...  It's not the facto of blindness
> itself that upsets me about this kid I never heard about in my life, it's
> the fact that he's here in Oregon...  Okay, I'll get over it and see if I
> can write someting to somebody that's informative enough to be helpful and
> spare his parents finding out along with him, the hard way, what that
> actually would mean for him.
>
> I lost my sense of direction.  Honestly!
>
>
>
> Tami Smith-Kinney
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:nagdu-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf
> Of Tracy Carcione
> Sent: Monday, April 18, 2011 7:24 AM
> To: nagdu at nfbnet.org
> Subject: [nagdu] What trainers don't know
>
> I suspect trainers don't know much about a dog's house behavior, because
> they don't see the dog in that setting.  During training, the dogs are in
> a kennel setting.  No beds to lie on, no counters to jump on, no socks to
> chew.  The trainers might take a dog into the house for a bit, if the dog
> is having trouble with kennel life, but I don't think that happens too
> often.  So, unless the raiser mentions something, I don't think they
> really know.
>
> I'm not sure they would know if a dog could start emptying on route,
> either. It's my understanding that, before going out for training, that
> part of the dog string has a chance to run and play and do their business.
> If I had ten dogs for Ben to run and play with for a while before going
> for a walk, he might get enough stimulation to go before we go.
>
> Not to make excuses for a trainer not mentioning stuff, but I think there
> are things they just don't know.
> Tracy
>
>
>
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