I met my trainer at lunchtime and after doing some practice of correcting Sadie when she lunged towards someone she knew (my trainer) we headed off to Sainsburys again.  Paw perfect by Miss Pops and we reached Sainsburys with my trainer commenting that I could get a performance out of Sadie that none of the current mobility team members could.  Somewhat stating the obvious here, but when I’m taught how to handle my dog, I handle my dog very well! After praising Sadie for finding the entrance to the supermarket we went out of the exit and asked her to find the bus stop pole and did a bit of practice with her to locate the particular pole I wanted her to and then got the bus back to my workplace.

Me and buses will never get on – they are a necessary evil on rare occasions for me.  I had said to my trainer a couple of weeks ago when discussing how we would approach my refresher training that I would use the bus if it helped to ease Sadie into her new workload level but I didn’t want to place any reliance on them in the longer term, and this was why we were getting the bus back to the hospital I work in.  One of the many reasons I applied for a guide dog is my love of walking so getting buses on routes I’m able to walk doesn’t make best use of my dog and certainly won’t help her weight loss (or mine!).  True to form my experience on this particular bus wasn’t the most pleasant and I reached my stop feeling cognitively overwhelmed and disorientated.  Before I had the chance to process what had made me feel like this and speak to my trainer about it, she made arrangements with me for the next day’s training when another trainer would be working with me later in the day.  She suggested a few possible destinations for our route work and commented that over the next while she would need to test whether it was Sadie or myself who lacked confidence when she wasn’t there to support us and then left Sadie and I to return to my office.  That comment left me with food for thought.

The remainder of the day I chose to focus on the positivity of the first part of our training route work but knew I was going to have to speak to my trainer about whether using the bus would actually be of benefit in the next few weeks.