When you have a disability, particularly an invisible one like hearing loss, the people around you often forget you can't hear everything. You get left out of a lot of things, laugh in the wrong places because you misread their lips or misheard something (I'm hearing impaired, not deaf yet, it's a wonky between-worlds kind of thing), and people get mad at you a lot or think you're mad at them.
Even when they know you can't hear them and they are trying to be your ears for you, they forget to alert you on important sounds because they forget. They get busy talking, or involved in other people, and you're left trying to get a look at their faces, at their hands if they use ASL (none of my friends do), and craning your neck to see everything around you incase you need to step aside or leap back or something. It's tiring work when you can only half hear what's happening.
A service dog changes all of that - dramatically.
Itzl doesn't ever tire of alerting me to sounds. To him, it's his entire life.
Well, except when he has a serious case of spring fever. Or when he's got a bad case of gas. Or when he just wants to play a different game. Alerting is a game to him and when we do the same things day after day after day, he gets bored. A bit. He plays the game, but it's like playing the exact same chess game move for move day after day. He sighs a lot.
On the days that blur together, when we do the same things at the same times and the sounds are all the same ones, he gets restless. He wants work, and lots of it. He'll pace my desk, ears pricked forward and swiveling to catch the slightest sounds. "That? Can I alert on that?" "What about this sound? Is it alert-worthy?" You can see these in his eyes, his stance. And then he just collapses into one of his beds (he has 2 on top of my desk - I have a really big desk) with a heavy sigh and stares at me.
"You're no fun", his whole body says. "Why aren't we at a convention? Don't we have a seminar to attend?" He glances out the window. "We could watch the construction crew, make sure they don't back over the petunias."
If I make the slightest move towards a door or his carrier, he's right there, tail wagging, eyes excited. "We're going somewhere! Yay! Real work!"
My friends all had to remember to clue me in on sounds and would forget if they got distracted. Itzl is the opposite. He will alert on each and every sound he's been trained to alert on, and new sounds if he's never heard them before.
But when he gets bored, when it's the same sounds day after day, he gets up, stretches, looks at me, saunters over, tilts his head at the sound source and yawns. You can hear him say, "Yeah, yeah, it's time for that beep, that card swipe, that door bell...blah dee dah dee dah." Sometimes, when it's a sound that happens at the same time every day and I've already told him multiple times he can ignore that sound (like the testing of the tornado sirens every Saturday at noon), he doesn't even bother to get out of his bed. He just looks at me and sighs with his whole body, then looks at the source of the sound (the tornado sirens are placed on top if the high school behind our house - my backyard fence is all that separates my yard from the school's yard), sighs again when I signal him to stand down, and collapses back into his bed. "Job's done, nothing else to do. Bored now," his whole body proclaims.
I have to remember to feed Itzl's need to be working. When we reach the point that he sighs to alert on the same old same old sounds, it's time for a road trip, or a festival, or even just to go shopping.
He serves me unconditionally, but he makes it totally clear that he does so only because he's an anal-retentive work-a-holic with a strong Type-A personality, and if he were human, he'd have abandoned me to my own devices because I am boring him to tears.
These past 2 weeks have been like that - go to work, come home, work on a project that doesn't involve noise, go to bed, get up and repeat. He's been sighing at me a lot.
Tonight, I have a surprise for him. We're going to the woods to collect materials for my hobby and then shopping for glue and orris root. He'll get to alert on wild animals, geese, hidden waterfalls, cars honking, back-up beeps from SUVs in the parking lots, and door chimes in the shop. He will be excited and happy. He'll live on the pleasure of working hard for at least a week before he starts sighing at me again.
Before Itzl can get bored, though, we have a staff meeting Saturday morning to complete some plans for an upcoming convention, and then Saturday afternoon, we have a volunteer coordination meeting for a different event and we'll get to meet this year's volunteers there. Saturday evening, he has a date at a cat shelter to play with kittens and teach them to like dogs. He speaks fluent Cat and has taught Dog to many kittens, making them more adoptable. Sunday, we'll return to the woods, and then back to our quiet routine for the week days.
The next 4 weekends are packed with activities - a fair, a convention, planning meetings for both, and a road trip.
These things will keep him alert, excited, and happy to be of use. Itzl serves unconditionally, but he serves happier when it's busy and thrilling and filled with noisy activities and lots of people talking to me.