Bring out the party hats! Hanni turns 17 years old today. You read that right: seventeen.

Loyal dog followers know that after Hanni retired from guide work, she went to live with our dear friends Nancy and Steven. They started celebrating the big day last Sunday with a visit to nearby Homer Lake–Nancy sends audio messages to my iPhone whenever they head to that forest preserve. The audio reports are a joy to hear — they always come with background sound of Hanni panting after a run or chomping on well-deserved treats. “We’re getting ready for Hanni’s big 17th on Wednesday,” Nancy said in Sunday’s audio report. “It’s a beautiful day, sunny, the geese are out, hard to believe it’s February.”

I guess it should be hard to believe that a 17-year-old Labrador and Golden Retriever Cross can still get out and enjoy a romp at a forest preserve, but I’ve gotten used to it. My first Seeing Eye dog Dora retired at 12 and lived to be 17 years old, and my third dog, Harper, who retired after saving us from getting hit by a car in Chicago traffic, is healthy and robust at age 8. The excellent health of these mature dogs has everything to do with the wonderful friends who adopt my retired dogs, but the care and research the Seeing Eye and other guide dog schools put into their breeding programs deserves a lot of credit, too.

Some schools still train service dogs who’ve been donated from individuals or from animal shelters, but the more established guide dog schools breed their own dogs in order to end up with the unique traits so important to guide work:

• excellent health
• intelligence
• temperament
• willingness to work
• ability to thrive on praise

The Seeing Eye breeds Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers, Lab/golden crosses and German Shepherds. Decades of research has gone into the Seeing Eye’s breeding program, much of it driven by the fact there is no “perfect Seeing Eye dog.” Dogs of all sorts of temperament, size, strength, speed and energy are necessary to match with blind people who come to the Seeing Eye school with, guess what, all sorts of temperament, size, strength, speed and energy levels. The Seeing Eye web site says their breeding station has “interconnected geometric pavilions, designed so that dogs can see each other and see people enter the kennel, so barking–not to mention stress – are greatly reduced.” Their goal? “To provide a facility most conducive to a positive early childhood experience for the puppies.” I just love that.

And I just love Hanni, too. I’m so grateful the Seeing Eye bred her for me, and so happy to think of her celebrating with Nancy and Steven today. Happy birthday, dear Hanni. Happy birthday to you.

Beth’s posted extensively here about leading memoir classes for senior citizens—and she’s posted the work of some of her students, who have some pretty extraordinary tales.

Coming soon!

That class has meant a lot to Beth and to the folks who are writing their own stories, so much so that it’s the basis for Beth’s next book. It’s called Writing Out Loud: What a Blind Teacher Learned from Leading a Memoir Class for Seniors. Beth’s been working very hard with her editor at Golden Alley Press (which published one of her student’s books, The House in Prague). Beth’s new book will be available this spring.

Golden Alley has also been hard at work on a painfully overdue revamp of Beth’s web site and the Safe & Sound blog. I got a preview of it this past weekend and I love it. For those of you who remember The Jeffersons TV show theme song, all I can say is, We’re moving on up, to a deee-luxe apartment in the sky. Or on the interwebs.

Golden Alley will likely launch the new web site and blog later this week—and here’s fair warning: the first time you visit the new online digs, don’t worry, it’s still us, just in a new place with a brand new look. Here’s what you need to know:

• Right now, Beth has a web site at bethfinke.com, and this blog, at https://bethfinke.wordpress.com. The new site at www.bethfinke.com will house the blog at www.bethfinke.com. So if you’re a Beth Finke fan, you’ll have one-stop shopping.
• If you subscribe to the blog, don’t worry, you’ll still receive posts in your inbox. Our Golden Alley Press people are going to bring you along. And if you’ve bookmarked the bethfinke.wordpress.com URL, you’ll get redirected.

Coming sooner! (Like this week.)

Bottom line: Things will look different, and a lot better, but you don’t have to do anything different.

Like I said, I’ve seen the work in progress and it’s a really nice site. The best site. A fabulous site. It’s going to bring coal back. It’s bigly. And Mexico is paying for it!

Just kidding. Sorry. Couldn’t resist.

But seriously folks, when you visit the new digs, don’t worry, it’s really us.

I am pleased to introduce my friend Rachel Arfa as a guest blogger today. Rachel and I both advocate for cultural accessibility, and we met, guess where? In a theater lobby after enjoying a play. Rachel is profoundly deaf, communicates by talking and lipreading and uses bilateral cochlear implants to hear. A 2017 Fellow in the Illinois Women’s Institute for Leadership (an organization training Democratic women to run for office), Rachel was there to help other people with disabilities participate in the Women’s March in Chicago on January 21, 2017.

by Rachel Arfa

Many volunteers helped make the Women’s March in Chicago accessible.

10,000.

10,000 people.

The number seemed daunting. We had just committed to providing accessibility for an event where the number of attendees might be as high as 10,000. Christena Gunther. Evan Hatfield. Risa Rifkind. Anna Cosner. We’d worked together on various cultural accessibility initiatives before, but never on this scale.

But we knew it would be worth it.

The details: Petrillo Stage in Grant Park, Saturday, January 21, 2017. The five of us met weeks ahead of the march to put together a plan to make the rally portion accessible. We wrote access information for the Women’s March website, conducted a site visit to scope out all the access points and determined placement for all the accessibility needs.

One week before the March, the location of the rally was changed.

We scuttled our initial plans, visited the new site at Jackson and Lake Shore Drive and re-assessed what would work.

And then the number of projected attendees grew from 10,000 to 22,000. This was getting big!

And then, the site changed again. Two days before the Saturday March, the location was moved to its final site, Jackson and Columbus. Weather reports were coming in, temperatures in Chicago were predicted to be well above average Saturday, and the final estimate of marchers was projected at anywhere from 50,000 to 65,000.

We met at the site the night before the march to walk through our plan and update the website about accessibility offerings – we wanted marchers with disabilities to know where to find accessibility tents if they needed more information once they arrived.

We were back at the site less than 12 hours later, at 6:30 a.m., to get ready for attendees to arrive. We’d recruited enthusiastic volunteers from Chicago’s theaters, museums and outdoor spaces – all had experience in working to make their own organizations welcoming and accessible to audiences with disabilities.

Rachel and her friends are in there!

One accessibility tent was set up at the entrance to the rally, and the one near the stage was where attendees could check out audio description headsets and assistive listening devices. The audio describer set up her equipment in a spot with full view of the stage, armed with her stenographer’s mask. The American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters decided on their stage set-up. The screen for Open Captioning was placed on stage at optimal height for viewing. The chairs set up to provide seating for those unable to stand for extended periods of time were moveable, which created easy access for attendees using a wheelchair or mobility device. A DeafBlind participant was provided enough space for tactile interpreting to have access to what was happening on stage. Individuals who experience anxiety or PTSD had enough space to move around and not feel claustrophobic. And, oh yes. An easy route to the accessible port-a-potties was established as well.

The morning sped by as attendees arrived, but when I found the time, I reached out to some of them to ask if they’d be willing to let us know what their experience was like. Here are just three excerpts of many, many testimonials:

• Bryen Yunashko: This was the first time that I, as a DeafBlind person, was able to fully access a political rally in Chicago. The efforts and constant dialogue by the accessibility team in the weeks following up to the March to ensure DeafBlind access was amazing, conscientious, dedicated and authentic. This event is a shining example for all future events in Chicago and elsewhere.
• Aziza Nassar: The volunteers and staffers were very accommodating and culturally appropriate. Within seconds of my arrival to the gate, I was greeted by a woman who asked me and my friend (who is also a wheelchair user) whether we needed “dedicated assistance.” She pointed us in the direction of a tent full of volunteers just ready to assist, and another woman walked us down to the accessible viewing area for the rally stage pointing to the wheelchair accessible Port-a-Pottys.
• Justin Cooper I knew that many of my friends would be in attendance and I wanted to be there to show my support. The accessibility that was provided made me feel like I was welcomed, that I was apart of the March, and that people with disabilities (especially women with disabilities) were included. I give credit to all the volunteers who helped.

These efforts were successful because disability access was integrated into the design of the event, including each time the venue changed. The March organizers recognized early on the need for disability access and supported our efforts after we’d come on board.

During the March it was announced not that there were 10,000 in attendance, not 22,000 in attendance, or even 50,000 in attendance. It was announced at an early point that there were 150,000 attendees. Then, a second announcement came saying there were 250,000 attendees. The march was a huge success, and we’d designed accessibility that was easily adaptable to the scale needed.

250,000 people.

250,000 strong.

This post was originally published on the Easterseals national blog last Thursday, February 2, 2017.

Well, we sure live in interesting times.

I still have about a thousand too many thoughts to sort out before I try to make sense of it all. Not that I can do that, but it’ll be therapeutic to try.

Meantime, I turn my attention to Mary Tyler Moore, who—between the Dick Van Dyke show in real time, the Dick Van Dyke Show in after-school reruns, and the Mary Tyler Moore Show in real time, and in reruns—always seemed to be part of the fabric of my own and so many others’ lives.

Others have done a fantastic job of chronicling and evaluating her show business career. It was fantastic—and for anyone who knows anything about type 1 (or juvenile) diabetes, it borders on the miraculous.

Beth had already been listening to one of Moore’s memoirs when the news broke last week about Moore’s death. The two were diagnosed with type 1 about the same time, in 1966. Beth was much younger, of course, but Moore has always been something of a role model. The book Beth was listening to is called Growing Up Again: Life, Loves, and Oh Yeah, Diabetes. It includes details about the always dreary and often terrifying slog that is being a type 1 diabetic.

One particularly poignant passage about experiencing a low blood sugar episode:

I was enjoying myself window shopping, and even though the weather was warm, I was surprised when my reflection in a storefront revealed dark stains on my favorite shirt.

Hmm.

I was perspiring like a race horse. No, like a farm animal. Suddenly I felt like I was sinking into a swamp of anxiety.

I was surprised to find myself digging in my handbag. For what?

I couldn’t remember.

Ah, yes. Lifesavers. I’d been told to keep Lifesavers always with me in case I experienced an episode of low blood sugar. I preferred all cherry.

Yes! That’s what it was! Low blood sugar! I was now trying to deal with the shakes as I continued digging. Eureka! Under a crumbled handkerchief, and just to the right of my wallet, there lurked my salvation. Have you ever tried to open a roll of Lifesavers when your hands are shaking?

She also provides a vivid description of laser treatments to her eyes. The short of it is she suffered, though less severely, the same condition that cost Beth her eyesight. In people who have type 1, the tiny blood vessels in places like your kidneys or your retina can get clogged up over time. The body tries to compensate by growing new ones, but they’re weak, and they burst or leak. In the eyes, that leads to blobs that obstruct vision. Lasers are used to cauterize the new, unwanted vessels.

Her vision fluctuated, and she describes being in what I call visual limbo states—when she could see a little, but just enough to embarrass her self at parties or public outings.

One time when she accidentally took the wrong kind of insulin before bed, she passed out and was rescued by her husband. One kind of insulin is fast acting—you take it right before a meal or snack. The other is time-released. You take it before bed and it works to maintain a constant blood sugar level. She took the wrong kind before bed and it nearly killed her.

Beth and I have experienced every one of these situations, with slightly different details. There’s a tendency to think, “Well, you just take insulin.” I’m here to tell you, it’s not that simple. You can be totally vigilant, totally committed, and still have low blood sugar reactions. The alternative—to avoid passing out or suffer impaired judgment—is to run a little high all the time. But that can lead to long-term consequences.

And any time your hormones change—say, menopause (and pregnancy turns everything nutzoid), you have to find a new pattern of new doses, which almost always includes some trial and error.

That MTM could carry off her career the way she did, well, like I said, it’s miraculous. Here in Chicago, there’s another similar story—Ron Santo, the Hall of Fame Cubs third baseman, managed to play major league baseball at a star level. This, before we had things like two kinds of insulin or home blood testing devices.

I hate the damn disease. Absolutely hate it. So, if you, like me, enjoyed Mary Tyler Moore, think about giving to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. JDRF is a terrific organization—she had served as the international chairman of JDRF since 1984. In that role she testified in front of Congress and raised billions of dollars for research.

That research is promising on several fronts, and perhaps, maybe even in our lifetime, we can celebrate wiping type 1 diabetes off the map by tossing our hats in the air.

Happy birthday, Seeing Eye! The oldest guide-dog school in America was incorporated this day in 1929 after co-founder Morris Frank returned from a pioneering guide dog program in Switzerland. He and his Seeing Eye dog Buddy are the pioneers of the guide dog movement in the United States, and I have him and everyone affiliated with the school to thank for Dora, Hanni, Harper and Whitney — the four heroic dogs the school trained especially for me. To celebrate, I’m reblogging a post I wrote five years ago for Bark magazine’s blog. The post is about my first weeks at home in Chicago with Whitney, and it demonstrates how the Seeing Eye’s work doesn’t end when we leave the school with our new dogs!

Consistency is the key.

Beth Welcomes a New Seeing Eye Dog

January 23, 2012

You’d think having a new guide dog memorize routes and anticipate turns at corners would be the goal.

But it’s not.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: I have the route memorized. I know how many streets we have to go forward before we turn left, then how many streets until we turn right again to get to our destination.

Whitney, my new two-year-old Labrador/Golden Retriever cross, guides me through our apartment lobby, we get ourselves situated on the sidewalk in the direction I want us to go, I command, “forward!” and my spunky sprite guides me safely to the curb. When she stops, I stop. That’s how I know we’re at the intersection. That, and the sound of cars. Whitney waits as I listen for traffic, and when I deem it is safe, I command her to lead me right, left or forward.

Whitney has a smart bump. It shows. In our first week home in Chicago she had already started memorizing my route to the pool where I swim laps, the cultural center where I teach memoir-writing classes, and my cubicle at my part-time job in the Willis (formerly known as Sears) Tower.

These routes became so familiar to Whitney that she knew to make the turns without bothering to go all the way to the curb first or waiting for my command. A near-miss in traffic with my last Seeing Eye dog, Harper, left him so afraid of traffic that he had to retire early. Our brush with that car, the months of work to encourage Harper past his fear, and the subsequent decision to retire him from guide work—it all shook me up, too.

Whitney’s decision to keep us away from the edge of the intersections, to just go ahead and make turns on her own, well, it meant I didn’t have to face the rush of traffic in front of us. I felt safe.

Until Whitney started crossing intersections diagonally, that is. Dang that smart bump! The girl is so clever that when she knew we’d be turning right or left once we crossed the street, she figured hey, why not save time? We’ll just go kitty-corner. Whitney had also taken to veering right and left long before our approach to any and all intersections, leaving us discombobulated as she anticipated a turn.

And if there is one place you especially don’t want to feel discombobulated with a Seeing Eye dog, it’s the approach to an intersection.

As it so often goes with dog training, the problem was consistency. I expected Whitney to take me right to the edge of a curb if I wanted to keep going straight (or if we were on our way somewhere new and I needed to know we were at an intersection). But on a familiar route? I’d let her decide for herself.

The Seeing Eye to the rescue! A trainer flew to Chicago to give me tips on which commands to use to drive Whitney all the way to the edge of the curb—the way she’d been taught at The Seeing Eye school. He showed me how to use the leash to encourage her to the edge. “Heap on the praise when you get there,” he urged. “Then stay right there a little while before giving her the command. Make sure she knows that you want her to stop right there and wait for your command at every single intersection.”

And you know what? It’s working. It’s comforting to know exactly where we are before we cross a street. Since The Seeing Eye tune-up, we don’t veer right and left before intersections anymore. Whitney knows what I expect of her, and she’s determined to get us to the curb.

Things are much clearer when I’m in charge. Whitney seems to appreciate the consistency, too. The more we work together, the more we trust each other. And best of all? She doesn’t cross intersections diagonally anymore!