Under One Roof: Service Dogs & Pet Dogs

I live a very tightly managed life. I have to, on account of living with full body Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. Managing as many details about how a room is set up, how easy it is to make meals, how many steps I need to take to accomplish a task, having different clothing options for different sensitivity level days, how much noise or stimulation I'm exposed to, and so on are only a few of the multitude of measures we've taken in our lives to minimize flares and maximize my service dog's ability to help me. 

It's easy to forget how particular we have been about building our life sandbox for me, because by now, it's not "accommodation" by our metrics, it's life. 

---

Recently, we stepped outside our sandbox to go on vacation to see my family on the East Coast, and got an extremely jarring shocks to our systems as a result. 1,800 miles driven, there & back, 2 days each way, and days of being without our system of structure, mitigation, and the added complication of something we usually have the luxury to avoid... The Untrained Pet Dog. It was a disaster and an absolute mistake to go at all. Me being me, I began writing this blog post on the drive home to offer suggestions to fellow and future service dog teams on handling this situation better than we did. ​

Read More