I’ve always liked Bears quarterback Jay Cutler. “That’s because you can’t see his face!” my football-loving friends at Hackney’s (our local tavern) tell me. “You can’t tell what a whiner he is.” Ever since Cutler broke his thumb in last Sunday’s game, though, it seems like it’s those Bears fans doing the whining, not my Jay.

Confession: I don’t really follow NFL football much. The reason I follow Jay Cutler? He has Type I diabetes. I have Type I diabetes, too – that’s the disease that caused my blindness.

Two very different conditions are referred to as “diabetes” – Type I, formerly known as juvenile diabetes, and Type II, the kind that is often brought on by obesity or poor nutrition. Type II involves a breakdown in the body’s ability to process the insulin it makes. So with Type II, if you watch your diet and exercise, you have a fair chance of improving the condition. With Type II, you can even reduce or even eliminate the need for insulin injections.

Type I, the kind of diabetes Jay Cutler and I have, is an autoimmune disease. With Type I, the body attacks and destroys its insulin-making cells. No matter what we do (exercise, diet, whatever) our bodies are unable to make insulin. We either have to take multiple injections of insulin throughout the day, or wear an insulin pump. There is no behavior that causes Type I. Doctors believe it is a genetic condition often triggered by an environmental stress. A virus, for example.

Type I is usually diagnosed in childhood (I was diagnosed when I was seven years old) but in recent years it has become increasingly common for people Cutler’s age or older to be diagnosed with Type I. We test our blood sugar levels regularly to know how much insulin to take. The more we test our sugar levels, the easier it is to walk the tightrope between high and low blood sugars. It’s never a walk in the park, though, and I cannot imagine what it must be like to walk that tightrope with a football in one hand while the other hand is fending off 300+-pound gorillas rushing to knock me down. It wasn’t easy to find details on how Jay Cutler handles his Type I diabetes on the football field, but finally I found an interview in Diabetes Forecast magazine where Cutler was asked how he uses a blood glucose monitor to check his blood sugar level on game days. His answer:

I check my blood sugar about four or five times before the game—try to stay around 150 to 160 [mg/dl] before kickoff. Most of the time, I prick my finger every time we come off the field, especially in the first half. There are definitely dangers out there—we try to avoid them at all costs. That’s why we check as many times as we do. I think the worst thing imaginable would be to get really low and pass out in the middle of a play, or in the huddle. That would scare a lot of people. I try to avoid it as much as possible, but it’s still a reality that could happen.

The interviewer also asked Cutler if he worried whether his teammates, the media, or fans might blame his Type I diabetes as a reason for poor performance. His answer:

I hope not. I don’t want sympathy—I want to be judged like every other quarterback. But living with diabetes in the public eye does make it harder. If I go out and my numbers are off and I have a bad game, I know I’ll be criticized for it. I just try not to worry about it and go out and play my game.

I dunno. This guy just doesn’t sound like a whiner to me. I sure wish the diabetic magazine had asked him about that Packers game last year, though. You know, the one where so many Bears fans accused Cutler of not being a “team player.” Who knows? Maybe he needed a blood test.

Dude has a new toy.

A few weeks ago I recorded an essay about Harper’s early retirement for Chicago Public Radio, and the piece aired last Tuesday onWBEZ.

Harper didn’t retire until a few days after I recorded the essay, so he was there in the studio sitting quietly at my feet while I sat at the microphone. I don’t cry during the recording, but if you listen closely you’ll hear me get a little choked up. I had assumed my terrific producer Joe DeCeault would cover up my stammers with music, but I guess he decided my verbal stumbles help tell Harper’s story. It’s all me. No sound effects.

Harper’s new family heard the piece, and Chris e-mailed Mike to send a review:

I heard Beth on the radio the other day – her and Harper’s story is always so moving and when I share it with others, they also seem touched by the two of them.

You know what? I find Harper’s new chapter with Larry and Chris very moving, too. I am touched by the three of them.

Chris updates Mike on Harper regularly, and they’ve found that taking him off leash and just walking alongside Harper makes him feel at ease. Soon as the leash goes back on, though, Harper shows anxiety again. Handsome Harper is charming all the neighbors, Chris says, and even George the cat comes out of his hiding place from time to time to say hello to Harper. The biggest news of all, as far as harper is concerned: Larry and Chris bought him a new squeak toy.

If you missed hearing the Harper essay on the radio last Tuesday, you can still check it out online. Listen closely, and maybe you’ll hear the little charmer jiggling at my feet!

I figured that once I told the animal sciences department at University of Illinois that Harper wouldn’t be coming with me, they’d cancel my guest lecture to their animal sciences class tomorrow. But I was wrong. Professor Amy Fisher wants me to come anyway, and I think the talk will be interesting. My plan is to use Harper’s early retirement as an example of just how difficult it is to prepare Seeing Eye dogs for the hard, hard work required of them.

From the Seeing Eye Web site:

Staff instructors are full-time employees who hold college degrees from various fields of study and have successfully completed three years of specialized on-the-job training. They relate well to dogs and people and are physically fit, since their jobs are physically demanding and involve working outdoors in all weather. Some of our current instructors came from teaching, business consulting and rehabilitation fields. Some were in the military and worked with dogs before, and many started out as kennel assistants here at The Seeing Eye.

A Seeing Eye trainer demonstrates how dogs learn to negotiate obstacles.

When people express interest in pursuing a job training guide dogs, I always remind them that they won’t just be working with dogs. They’ll be working with people, too. We blind folks are all different ages, and we have all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences behind us. Some of us are newly blind and still adjusting, others have been blind our entire lives. Although some of us might be easy to work with, a lot of us are brats. We test our teacher’s patience.

The Puppy Place (a Web site created by a group of volunteers who raise puppies for guide dog schools) says it well:

Guide Dog trainers must work with a variety of dogs within a given size range. A great deal of walking and upper body strength is required to mold hyper young dogs into responsible workers. In the beginning, when working with dogs alone, this may not seem bad, but soon the apprentice must team dog training with people training. You can’t leash correct your blind student, or give him/her a dirty look and expect the undesired behavior or wrong actions to stop. You must verbally communicate while physically managing to keep up with the dog. Coming out of yourself to work with both dogs and people is a special skill and not one to be taken lightly.

Schools receive literally hundreds of applications a year from people who want to train guide dogs, so even opportunities to become an apprentice are rare. Most guide dog schools do require instructors to do an apprenticeship, and some apprenticeships last as long as four years. From my observation, apprentices work very hard. And from what I hear, salaries are not that high. Considering that guide dog schools are non-profit organizations, I would guess the pay is far below what a lot of today’s college educated people expect to earn.

If you’re looking for job satisfaction, though, this kind of work must be pretty dang rewarding! For general information about working for The Seeing Eye, contact:

Human Resources
The Seeing Eye
P.O. Box 375
Morristown, NJ 07963
or email jobs@seeingeye.org.

Last Thursday I gave a presentation to a class at Carnegie Mellon University. Harper couldn’t make the trip to Pittsburgh, and I am

A few of the beautiful women in one of my memoir writing classes.

very grateful to my gracious husband Mike for stepping in as Seeing Eye Human and making this visit possible.

The class I spoke to was History 79-311: “Body Politics: Women and Health in America.” To prepare for my talk, I went to the experts. I asked the women in the memoir-writing classes I teach to write about “body image.” Their essays did not disappoint.

Myrna’s essay taught us that anorexia existed long before pop singer Karen Carpenter succumbed to it in the 1980s. Myrna wrote about growing up pudgy in a home where eating was “considered one of the great pleasures in life.” When she was sent away to camp at age 12, she saw it as a chance to lose some of the pudge and look more like the girls in magazines. The magazine girls were not as skinny then as now, Myrna acknowledged, but definitely trimmer than in life. This little 12-year-old girl starved herself at camp, devising ways to pick at her food to make it look like she’d eaten more than she had, always leaving the table early to dump what was left on her plate into the trash. It was weeks before the camp counselors finally noticed. Myrna’s parents were summoned and took her home. From her essay:

A picture of me taken not long after I returned home shows me scrawny, for the first and last time in my life. I stopped menstruating for several months. Perhaps I thought that, too, was an accomplishment.

Myrna’s fellow memoir-writer Kathy had the opposite problem. Her essay described one of the long-lasting effects of growing up a late bloomer.

I waited, waited, waited! Friend and after friend smiled knowingly as she joined the ranks of women, no longer a girl. I was still my mother’s thin child with a chest flatter than flat. (Her body type had been all the rage in the flapper era!) Furtively, I began to stoop to conceal the absence of a Marilyn Monroe bosom. My posture, once erect and confident, became the rounded shoulders I have today…

One of the most intriguing essays came from Sheila. She wrote about life as an identical twin, describing her body as a carbon copy of her sister Clare’s — up to a point. “A slightly distorted mirror image is a better description.” At birth Sheila weighed in at 5 pounds, Clare at four pounds, some-odd ounces.

Weight has been a comparison point for our entire lives. Clare was always a size smaller than me. I resented weighing more than her. No one, even strangers would let me forget the difference. “She’s bigger than the other one. Otherwise, they look exactly alike.”

The twins are in their 60s now, and Clare put on weight after being immobilized by foot surgery.

Finally, she’s as big as me. It doesn’t feel as good as I thought it would. All my life I wanted to be the same size or smaller than Clare. How come I don’t feel like celebrating?

There is not much to celebrate about becoming blind, but one thing I appreciate about not being able to see is that I can no longer judge people by how they look. I am left to judge others on more important things: what they say, and what they do.

In my scholarly research for Thursday’s talk at Carnegie Mellon I came across one study that found that blind women have lower body dissatisfaction scores and more positive eating attitudes than women who can see. From the study:

The high levels of body dissatisfaction and abnormal eating attitudes currently prevalent in Western societies have been attributed by many authors to the promotion of an unrealistically thin ideal for women. We investigated the role of the visual media by examining the relationship between body image dissatisfaction and eating attitudes in visually impaired women.

The results suggest the importance of the visual media in promoting unrealistic images of thinness and beauty.

All pretty interesting stuff, and I thank my friends in Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University for inviting me to present on the topic – I ended up learning a lot!