A Girl and Her Dog

Me and Daisy on the campus of the University of Oklahoma, where I am currently a student. A friend of mine took these pictures.

Daisy is my certified professional Hearing Dog, trained by Paws With a Cause. We've been partnered for about 4 years now. She goes everywhere with me, including to classes. She likes to compete with my classmates as to who can sleep the most in class!

(Pictures deleted)



Edit: Here is a link to my friends photo site, go see the rest of his pics!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fallsroad/

 

awww what a sweet picture...
and you are such a cutie patootie...

 

i agree with shroom!
what a sweet dog and you look absolutely beautiful! i love your hair

 

awwww i love her!! such a sweet picture!! awwww

 

you're beautiful both of ya I want that shirt

 

Bree is radiant

 

Thanks everyone! I just added another pic below it.

 

me too!!

 

Aww, great pics! You're very pretty, and I love your hair!

 

And me too!

Love your pics, Bree, you're really pretty!

 

I hope you're not offended with this question, but are you deaf or are you just training the dog until he goes to help a deaf person?

I'm partially deaf, but not enough to need a hearing dog... i kinda wish i was so i could take him everywhere, hehe...

 

aww sweet girl. You are lovely! the second pic looks so peaceful...fresh, and alive! i love you chickie!

 

Aww thanks everyone! **bats eyes and blushes**

Actually I am technically 100% deaf. I now have Cochlear Implants though, basically bionic ears, or robotic hearing. They help me go from "stone deaf" to "hearing impaired", so to speak. It's not real hearing, nor is it as good as real hearing, nor does it help me to hear as well as most "hearies". But it's better than nothing. It's not hearing aids either, but I take the outside parts off at night and when I have to take them off I am back to being 100% deaf, until I put them on again the next morning (same applies to showers and swimming and whatnot.)

When I got Daisy, I was still wearing only one hearing aid. I was stone deaf in one ear and the ear that I wore the hearing aid in only heard about 15 to 20% or so with the hearing aid in. (It was something like 2 or 3 % without hearing aid lol) Even though I can "hear" much better now with the implants, like I said it's not perfect and I still have to take the outside parts off, so I still need her.

It's not as cool as you think it is, to take a dog everywhere. You get absurd amounts of attention and it's not always positive attention. Everywhere you go someone stares, gawks, points, or says something and half the time you are trying to fight people off your dog so to speak, no one pays attention to the fact that you aren't supposed to pet a working dog when it's on duty in a public place. So in addition to paying attention to the dog and doing your job to communicate to the dog (difficult in itself sometimes), you've got to try to deal with people's ignorant crap as well as helping the dog ignore the ignorant crap too. As if that wasn't bad enough, you have to deal with ignorant employees in the public places that don't know the laws about service dogs.

It's not easy, and it's really only fun at first. After a while it becomes a bit tiresome, like towing a perpetual 4 year old child with you everywhere you go. You have to constantly be on gaurd, paying attention ALL the time to the dog to make sure it's behaving appropriately, correcting it if not, maneuver the dog out of people's way, and occasionally clean up a mess (knocks something over, has an accident if it's sick and you don't know it) and they are still dogs, which means they have their mischievous moments. You also have to lug a small amount of supplies for the dog (Daisy almost has her own "diaper bag") and sometimes things come up that you can't do because you have the dog, such as riding amusement rides or going to rock concerts or other things that would otherwise endanger the dog's health.

"So why do it?" you ask? Because if someone truly needs the dog, the help the dog provides far outweighs the inconveniences that go along with it, and makes it all worth it.

 

you're amazing.

 

You're pretty. What are you studying at Oklahoma?

I used to do research in implantable hearing aids, not cochlear implants, but I am familiar with them.

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Since you had hearing at one time, you know all the nuances of hearing. That should be a benefit to you with respect to a cochlear implant. Did you go through any trials regarding fine-tuning of the cochlear device to optimize its fidelity? Just curious. People who have never had hearing don't have a reference by which to judge the fidelity of a device like a cochlear implant.

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you and daisy are lovely

 

I only had hearing til age 4. That's when it started declining. I wore two hearing aids from that point on to age 11, when I lost most of what I had left. So I honestly don't remember much of actual hearing, only what I heard with hearing aids, which wasn't that good. The doctors didn't think I'd do that well with the implants due to hardly hearing anything for 12 years by the time I got them, but I suprised them all and did better than they thought I would. The only way I know the implant is better than the hearing aid is because I got implanted one at a time, in my deadest ear first, so that for a time I had the implant in one ear and the hearing aid in the other, so I could compared. I had originally intended to leave it this way but once I heard how muffled and bad the quality was in the hearing aid vs. the implant, I decided to implant that ear too.

As for fine-tuning, that occurs every 3 to 6 months and eventually every year or as needed for the rest of your life. It's not a one-shot deal, as your brain adjusts to the implants signals and all, things change, and the implants have to be re-programmed to work with the changes. All that really involves is sitting hooked up to a computer and providing feed back to the audiologists. I call it going to my "docking station for a tune-up" (Think Star Trek, I'm a cyborg!)

 

aww cute