Chloe turned 4-years-old on Saturday. 

A kiss from the birthday girl!  I should know better than tell her “Happy Birthday” close enough to get kissed for it!

1.  If your hearing assistance dog suddenly tenses and crouches right when you get ready to heave a big basket of laundry upstairs… look for stow-away cats before proceeding.

2.  Leave your cell phone in the bedroom, not with discarded clothing when taking a bath.  You do NOT want your hearing assistance dog alerting when you are under a mountain of bubbles.  MESSY!

3.  Try to have patience.  Dogs don’t have snooze buttons.  When your alarm goes off, their job is to get you up.  To “ignore them” until the alarm goes off again can “turn an alert” off in a trained dog.

4.  When having communion in church on Sunday morning, don’t say, “Stolen” to keep your assistance dog from being curious about what is in the passing plate.  The deacon standing there will pass out.

5.  If your dog’s automatic command for eliminating is “hurry up”, don’t ever use this phrase again in conjunction with terse commands for your children shopping along side of you.

6.  A hearing assistance dog is trained to do an automatic retrieve (although Chloe can do a directed retrieve as well).  This means anything dropped in her vicinity is picked up and handed to me.  She has “saved” me twice now in parking lots with my van keys!  It’s just so very unfortunate when a toddler drops that pacifier in line at the check-out.

7.  What a bummer to accidentally re-set the timer for 3 hours and 45 minutes when your turkey has finished baking, and you are now in bed.

8. “head up” and “look” (at me) are two very important commands when going to a public bathroom.  I’ve learned some new words from the exclamations coming from adjacent stalls when Chloe peeks her head under at someone.

9.  “What is it?” means SHOW ME WHERE THE SOUND IS COMING FROM.  It can be difficult extricating a large canine from your lap when she shows you it is coming from the whine from your hearing aid (feedback is the pits!)

10.  The dumbest thing I’ve ever heard was, “Can she drive too?”

Denise Portis

© 2008 Hearing Loss Journal