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A page for my black Labrador guide dog, Ivy, 1986 to 1999, from her partner, Patricia Swartz, of Richmond, Virginia.
I am blind. I built this page myself, one tag at a time, in Notepad, with a screen reader and a speech synthesizer reading every character back to me. It is made to be read aloud, by a machine or by a person.
So the type is large and black on plain white. The headings go in order, so if your screen reader can list them, you can jump to the part you want. There are no tables for layout, no moving text, no music, and only one picture. Every link says where it goes. If you are sighted, I hope it is restful. If you are not, I hope it is easy. Either way, if something trips you up, please write and tell me what. I would rather know.
I am sixty-four. I have retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease of the retina. As a girl I couldn't see in the dark, which everyone put down to clumsiness. At nineteen a doctor gave it its name. At twenty-four I was legally blind, and by thirty I had no useful sight at all. I worked thirty-four years as a medical transcriptionist at a hospital downtown, typing up what doctors said into their tape recorders, first on a typewriter with my notes in braille and then, from 1986 on, on a computer that talks. I can spell any medicine you can name. I retired in 1995.
Ivy was my third guide. The first was a German shepherd named Thane, from 1967 to 1977. The second was a golden retriever named Penny, from 1977 to 1988, a saint of a dog who worked until she was nearly thirteen. Ivy came next.
(The picture above, my sister Susan tells me, is a small brown dog standing sideways. Ivy was black, sixty-one pounds, with a tail like a bullwhip and ears like velvet. Use your imagination.)
She was born in the fall of 1986 at a guide dog school in the Northeast, to the school's own breeding stock. At eight weeks old she went to live with a volunteer puppy raiser, a woman named Bonnie Pollitt with three boys and a station wagon, who took her everywhere for over a year so that she would learn that buses and elevators and shopping carts and boys were nothing to worry about. Then she went back to the school for months of formal training. In October 1988 I flew up for class, and on my second day there an instructor named Robyn Broughton brought her into my room and put the leash in my hand. Ivy put her nose in my pocket and found a cough drop. That was that.
Class was four weeks. You live at the school and you and your new dog learn to work together, on quiet streets first, then busy ones, then stores and buses and a train station. You learn to feed and groom her and when to take her out. Mostly you learn to trust each other. Then you fly home together and start over in your own city, where nothing is laid out the way it was at school.
People have strange ideas about this, so here are the facts.
The dog does not know where we are going. I do. I am the navigator. I know the route, I count the blocks, I listen to the traffic, and I tell the dog what to do. The commands are short: Forward. Left. Right. Halt. Steady, to slow down. Find the door. Find the chair. Find the steps. Ivy did not take me to the grocery store because I said "grocery store." She took me there because I said Forward, Left, Forward, Right, Find the door, and she did each one beautifully.
The dog's job is to get me there safely. She walks in a straight line down the middle of the sidewalk. She takes me around anything in the way: a bicycle, a trash can, a man on a ladder, a child sitting on the sidewalk with chalk. She judges not just her own size but mine. She knows I am five foot six and as wide as a shopping bag on each side, and she will not walk me under a low tree branch or into a sign at the height of my head, even though she could pass under it herself. That part astonishes people.
She stops at every curb and every step, up or down, and waits. I find the edge with my foot. Then I decide.
The handler decides when to cross. A dog cannot read a traffic light. I listen. When I hear the cars on the street beside me start up and roll along in the same direction I am facing, the light is with me, and I say Forward. That is my decision, every time. It is not the dog's.
And she will refuse a command that would walk me into danger. The schools call it intelligent disobedience. If I say Forward and a car is turning across our path, or someone has left a cellar door open, or there is a trench the gas company forgot to fence, a good dog will not go. She will stop dead, or back me up, or stand in front of my legs. In nine years Ivy refused me perhaps a dozen times that mattered. Once, in 1991, a car ran a red light on the four-lane at the end of my street while I was stepping off the curb with the light, and Ivy backed into my knees so hard that I sat down on the sidewalk. The car missed us by the length of a dog. A man who saw it came and helped me up and told me what had happened, and he was shaking worse than I was. Ivy was wagging.
The harness is the switch. When the harness is on, she is working, and she is serious and steady and proud. When it comes off, she is a Labrador, which is to say a sofa cushion with an appetite.
I know you mean well. I know she is beautiful. But a guide dog in harness is doing a job that keeps a person alive, and the moment she is thinking about you, she isn't thinking about the curb. So, please:
Ivy and I worked together for nine years and nine months, from October 1988 to the summer of 1998. Here are the roads we wore out.
Home to the bus stop. Two blocks, one street crossing, and a hedge that was never trimmed. Ivy took me around that hedge four thousand times and never once stopped looking offended by it.
The bus downtown, every working morning until I retired. Ivy would find the bus door, put her front paws on the bottom step and wait for me to find the rail. Then she found me an empty seat and lay under it with her chin on my shoe. Some of the regulars never knew there was a dog on the bus.
Mr. Theodore Sneed drove that route for most of those years. He called out every stop in a voice like a radio announcer, long before the law said the drivers had to, and he called out the weather too. He never once spoke to Ivy while she was working. On my last day before retirement he got off the bus at my stop and shook my hand, and then he asked if he could finally pet her, and I took off the harness right there on the sidewalk, and the two of them made fools of themselves while the bus waited.
Mrs. Sandra Wagnon drove the evening route and hummed hymns under her breath, and if Ivy sighed loudly under the seat she would say Amen. Mr. Franklin Mikula, who drove on Saturdays, kept dog biscuits in his jacket and never gave Ivy one without asking me first, and I always said yes when she was off duty, and she knew the sound of his jacket before he opened the door.
The hospital. Through the revolving door, which she hated and did anyway; to the elevator; Find the button; up to the fourth floor; Find my desk. She slept under it for six and a half years while I typed, and snored, and the doctors who came by to check their reports learned to step over her. One of the surgeons claimed she was the only one in the department who never complained about his handwriting.
The grocery store on Saturdays. She learned which checkout lane had the nice cashier, and she always tried to go to it, even when it was closed.
Church on Sundays, to the same pew, sixth from the front on the left. The year we had a new minister, Ivy groaned audibly during his first sermon, which went long. He took it well.
My sister Susan's house across the river, two buses and a walk. Susan has a cat. Ivy spent nine years pretending the cat was furniture, which is the most professional thing I have ever seen a dog do.
When she was eleven Ivy began to slow down. She hesitated at curbs where she never had before. She was tired on hills, and on the long walk to my sister's she wanted to stop and lean on my leg. Our vet, Dr. Stephen Carrero, found arthritis in her hips and told me what I already knew: she was still willing, but working was starting to cost her. A guide dog will go on trying long after she should stop, because she loves the work. It is the handler who has to say when.
I said when in July of 1998. I took her harness off for the last time in my kitchen, hung it on the hook by the back door, and told her she was a very good girl, and she thumped her tail on the floor and went to sleep. I did not do so well.
Many guides go back to their puppy raisers when they retire, and the school offered. Bonnie Pollitt wrote to me and said she would love to have her, and meant it. But I could not do it, and Bonnie understood. Ivy stayed home as a pet. I went back to my long white cane for a while, which I hadn't used much since 1967, and found out my cane skills had gone rusty and my sense of humor hadn't. Ivy rode along on the leash beside me, out of harness, sniffing every tree she had been too busy to sniff for nine years.
Ivy died on May 14, 1999. She was twelve and a half.
That spring her kidneys began to fail. Dr. Carrero gave us some good weeks with a special diet and fluids, and then they stopped being good. She stopped eating. On the last morning she could not get up from her bed by the back door, under the hook where the harness hung.
Susan drove us to the vet's office. I sat on the floor of the exam room on a blanket from home, and Ivy lay with her head in my lap. Dr. Carrero explained everything first, so I would know what was happening without being able to watch, and then he was very quick and very gentle. She went to sleep with my hand on her ear and my other hand on the place on her chest where the harness used to rest. She was breathing, and then she wasn't, and it was quiet. Susan says she looked peaceful. I will take her word for it. She felt peaceful.
I brought the blanket home. Her harness is still on the hook. I haven't decided about that.
Thank you, Ivy. Nine years of curbs, and you never missed one.
In the middle of August I flew back to the school for class. I am the oldest person there by twenty years, and the instructors are young enough to be my grandchildren, and I had a wonderful time.
His name is Rowan. He is a yellow Labrador, a male, twenty-two months old, seventy pounds, and he walks about twice as fast as Ivy did in her last years, so I am doing a great deal of saying Steady. He has never seen a hedge he didn't want to investigate. He has a lot to learn about Richmond, and I have a lot to learn about him. We came home on Labor Day weekend and we have been practicing the old routes every morning.
Last week we got on the bus downtown for the first time. Mr. Sneed is still driving that route. He called out the stop, and then he said, "Well, look who's back," and then he said nothing at all to Rowan, which is exactly right.
I'll write more about Rowan as we go. He is not Ivy. He isn't supposed to be.
If you are a guide dog handler, a puppy raiser, a bus driver, or just someone who wants to know more, please write. My screen reader reads e-mail just fine. Plain text is best.
E-mail: [email protected]
Visitors since June 1999:
(My niece tells me the counter is little pictures of numbers. I gave each one its digit as a text
label, so your screen reader should say one thousand four hundred nine, give or take the
zeros.)
Last updated September 19, 1999.
Patricia Swartz, Richmond, Virginia.
I checked this page against the accessibility guidelines that the World Wide Web Consortium published in May, and ran it through Bobby, the free checker. If you build web pages, please read those guidelines. There are a lot of us out here listening.