Jodey Porter
Special to The Lake Report
I’ve been mostly blind, most of my life. I started losing my vision at about the age of five. The doctors believed my blindness was caused by Lyme disease.
Through the years, I have learned to survive, even thrive, with very little eyesight. I originally moved to Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1998 because the town was walkable for all the services I needed.
But on my birthday, almost three years ago, after five surgeries to counteract my diminishing sight, I lost all vision. It literally disappeared. These past three years have been a maelstrom of loneliness, tragedy, friendship and growth.
In early March of this year, after months of preparation, I travelled to New Jersey to meet the companion that will enable me to recapture my life. This is the story of that journey.
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This is the morning that I leave for Morristown, N.J. It’s early March and I’m worried about the weather for the drive.
I will be attending The Seeing Eye, the one of the oldest guide dog schools in the world, for nearly a month of instruction. I’ll learn how to partner with my new four-legged furry, sighted guide.
Since I completely lost my vision almost three years ago, my life has been transformed. I think it is the most awful thing that can happen to anyone. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time. It was beyond scary.
After a year of horrific crises, I finally found the freedom and capability to move beyond surviving — to move forward to becoming a full human being again.
I found help from dozens of friends and a mobility instructor who taught me white cane technique.
I hated that white cane. To me it became the image of helplessness and subservience.
And I was absolutely pathetic at it. It took me three months to find my way out of the front door of my townhouse, through the parking lot safely, down the driveway and to the street for a simple road crossing. Beyond humiliating and beyond exhausting.
The next logical step was a guide dog.
But it is tremendously hard to become eligible for a guide dog.
You need to be fully capable with a white cane, have completed a two-mile independent walk, including road crossings, be knowledgeable, independent, and so many other things.
And that’s not all. Guide dog school waiting lists are huge and vary tremendously in terms of quality of education and the success of students graduating. I was determined to find the very best.
Here I am on the morning that I’m about to take my next step and I think I’m just as frightened now as I was at the beginning of the journey. Oh my, thinking ahead, I’m going to have a new creature in my life.
Filled with doubts, fear and trepidation at what lies ahead, I am leaving on a road trip with a good friend from Niagara-on-the-Lake in a matter of hours. I am truly on my way.
Two mornings later, I wake up for the first time on the campus of The Seeing Eye Guide Dog School, in Morristown, a historic town of 20,000 people, some 60 kilometres west of New York City. It has the look and feel of Niagara-on-the-Lake, but bigger.
The campus is spacious, more than 80 acres, and students are housed in a large red brick building, beautifully ornamented with white casements and decorations in a post colonial style.
There are dormitories, a gymnasium, laundry rooms, meeting places and spots, thank heaven, to get extra coffee. And excellent food.
There will be 18 students around me — from all over the world. Two from Canada, one from the Netherlands, and several people from Germany, France and beyond.
The first days at the school are spent getting to know our instructor and vice versa. They need to know our personalities, our lifestyles, our walking pace and speed, how we will relate to a dog, and how we relate to other people, challenges, obstacles. Everything that makes us tick.
Our instructor is a retired professional photographer, who worked for various news organizations worldwide and was also a commercial photographer for Bacardi for several years.
I think it’s quite wonderful that a gentleman who has spent his life seeing for others through a camera is now helping hundreds to learn how to see our way forward using a guide dog.
On our first real working day, we travel into Morristown to walk with our instructor, who pretends to be a guide dog. I take the harness and the guide leash in my left hand and give my instructor/dog commands to move forward, stop, steady pace and so on.
The real work starts tomorrow …
That is D-Day — Doggy Day, when we will be matched with our puppies. Incredibly exciting.
- Next: Meet Doc, my new companion, friend and, in some ways, my saviour.
NOTL resident Jodey Porter is a former provincial assistant deputy minister of health and member of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Her story is told in collaboration with Tim Taylor.