Published19 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Bryony GordonBy Beth RoseBBC Access AllJournalist and author Bryony Gordon is an open book when it comes to talking about mental health, having lived with OCD, alcoholism, binge eating disorder and drug addiction. But being a woman and navigating health inequality is one challenge she hasn’t yet been able to overcome. “I am mad, but I’m also bloody angry,” Bryony says, nodding to her personal mental health challenges and how people can react to them.For many years she battled addictions, felt shame, recovered, relapsed and moved from one addiction to another, something she calls “cross addiction”. Often, she penned articles about her experiences in the Telegraph when she was looking for solidarity – a call of “anyone out there?” in the broadsheet.”The thing about all mental illnesses is that they thrive by lying to you,” she tells the Access All podcast. “By isolating you, by telling you that you’re a freak and by telling you that you’re alone.” Being able to bare herself to the world in her books and newspaper is something she now regards as a “really beautiful” way to connect with people, even if it can be “overwhelming”, especially when she learned her latest book had just beaten the currently popular One Day to the top of the Amazon book chart on publication day. Mad Woman is Bryony’s seventh book. But it is the one that got her thinking the most.Listen to the Access All podcast to hear more from Bryony GordonIt is the successor to her 2016 book, Mad Girl, all about her experiences of OCD, which came with a realisation.”People like to think you write your book about OCD and then you triumph over adversity. And as we all know this kind of life is a bit more nuanced and complicated than that.”What I’m trying to do by writing these books is to show you how recovery is messy. It is not linear.”Bryony was not immune to such straightforward hopes herself. “I really thought I’d sort of got it licked,” she says of her OCD. “New Year’s Eve 2019 I was like: ‘I’m sorted. I’ve triumphed!’.”Then March 2020 came around and Covid-19 hit.”I did not pick up a drink, but I did develop binge eating disorder. I fell back into quite a bad depression and the OCD came back pretty viciously,” she says.But it got Bryony thinking. Could extreme mental health responses actually be the brain responding proportionately to the situations we find ourselves in? She says it was the first time she had experience a depression when “everyone else around me was depressed too”.It made her consider whether it was entirely “appropriate” people were depressed because we were in lockdown and that is was just the brain alerting people to the fact “something isn’t right in your life, rather than it being down to a chemical imbalance which is how some people think about it. “If you are experiencing difficulties there’s probably a good reason for that,” she says. “So can we stop with this way that society gaslights, people and treats them like they’re freaks?”She feels women are most susceptible to this. Her book isn’t called Mad Woman for nothing. “In my experience, whenever I go to the doctor’s, it’s like, ‘try losing weight”.Image source, Bryony GordonIt was a palpitating heart that revealed to Bryony just how much inequality woman can face in the healthcare system when seeking medical help. She went to hospital and was told “‘it’s just your hormones’.”JUST my hormones?” Bryony scoffs. “They’re the most powerful chemicals known to humankind.”Eventually, she was diagnosed with arrhythmia and had an echocardiogram. A male doctor carried it out while also explaining to her what a triathlon was and how he had competed one in Spain which was “very hot” – Bryony considered it to be a classic example of “mansplaining”. “I let him go on and on and I let him have his plaudits and then I said ‘I’ve done a triathlon in Sardinia and I’ve done two marathons’, and he genuinely looked at me and he said. ‘How extraordinary’.” She says biases towards women and weight is something she comes up against all too often.She has been open about her binge eating disorder which has led to “chorizo blackouts” when she would obsessively buy, hide and eat packets of the Spanish sausage until the point of blackout. “I was eating vast, vast amounts of food – sometimes out of the bin – and it was to sort of try and calm myself. It was the only way I knew how, in absence of alcohol. I couldn’t pick up a drink, so I picked up the food instead.”Briony says it came with a huge amount of shame and was extremely difficult to manage given the body needs food to survive.”It’s like having to take a tiger out for a walk three times a day,” she says. “But it was as dark as the last days of my drinking were.”She says the pattern of focusing on women’s weight as a solve-all is detrimental and prevents so many people from seeking help, especially when it comes to binge eating disorder.”It’s not a weight issue. It’s a soul issue,” she says.”People with mental illness, do feel shame. So it is being able to see that we are suffering from an illness and it is not a moral failing. All organs misfire. We expect that. But for some reason the only one we judge is our brain.”Bryony’s way to reframe the shame has been through exercise. Eight years ago she set up Mental Health Mates which encourages people with mental health issues to walk and talk. It has inspired people to set up groups across the country.In April she will be taking on an epic challenge to raise money for her charity by running the Brighton Marathon, London Marathon and the distance in-between the two cities .People often joke that running has become another addiction for Bryony. But she’s pretty sure that’s not the case.”Exercise is so wonderful for the way it makes you feel, not the way it makes you look. Sadly, I don’t need to compulsively do it every day,” she laughs.Additional reporting by Niamh Hughes.You can listen to the podcast and find information and support on the BBC Access All page. You can contact Beth with a story by emailing bethany.rose@bbc.co.uk

Published1 hour agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBy Beth RoseBBC Access AllMollie Pearce might have fallen at the final hurdle of The Traitors and lost the £95k prize, but the model and healthcare assistant finds some comfort in what she achieved in opening up on her “double whammy” of disability – limb difference and living with a stoma. “I call my stoma Sid,” Mollie makes clear on the BBC’s Access All podcast. “I’m very proud of Sid. He’s helped me in a lot of ways.”Sid the stoma came into Mollie’s life just a few years ago when she was 18 (she turned 22 on Sunday, 48 hours after the epic TV final).Mollie had been diagnosed with ulcerative colitis aged 11. The autoimmune condition causes inflammation in the large intestine triggering ulcers and debilitating pain. It came to dominate her teenage years stopping certain basic activities and the number of school days missed.”When I was suffering with ulcerative colitis I couldn’t be away from a toilet,” she says.Aged 18 she underwent “massive” surgery to have her colon removed and her small intestine diverted out of an opening in her abdomen known as a stoma. “That colons in the bin,” she says theatrically. “Now, my small intestine sticks outside of my stomach and I have a stoma bag over the top, which collects my waste. “I would never have been able to do the missions in the middle of a field or the middle of a loch. So actually having a stoma bag is the best thing I’ve ever done.”Listen to the Access All podcast with Molly Pearce from The Traitors, and spot the moment when the tables turn and Michael starts to interview Access All’s blind presenter , Emma Tracey, about her experiences…It was something the Bristolian opened up about in the penultimate episode of this year’s series when the final five were enjoying a celebratory dinner. “I really struggled to get my head around the fact that I was going to have a stoma,” she told her fellow finalists. “I wasn’t prepared for it. Eighteen-years-old, you kind of want to be out enjoying yourself with your friends, not having this life changing surgery.” She says it felt right to open up at that point in the game.”We’d got to the final and we were just celebrating. It just made me realise how far I’d come from that girl who was so unwell and couldn’t leave the house.”An energetic island hopping trip around Greece two summers ago with her boyfriend, had given Mollie the confidence to take up the offer of appearing on The Traitors and take on the physical challenges including swimming and climbing, while wearing a stoma bag. “I loved the physical missions,” she says. “They were such a good break from all the mind games and it was a really good bonding experience. Sid’s given me the kind of option to do these things.”In terms of the practicalities, Mollie says she didn’t need any extra support throughout the series, and she got into a good routine. She changed her bag every three to four days and emptied it whenever she visited the loo. Having ulcerative colitis was something going on inside her body whereas she has a much more visible impairment too.She says living with an invisible illness has been much harder to explain to people than her limb difference on her right hand. Without the visual evidence she has found people often think “you look so healthy but, really you are suffering so much.”As well as working as a hospital healthcare assistant in Bristol, it was Mollie’s limb difference which landed her a glamorous side hustle – what she describes as “disability modelling”. “I saw a model in Primark who had one arm and I’d never seen a disability model before,” she says.”The way that model made me feel in that moment…I was like ‘that is how I want to be for other people’.”Molly was initially signed as a model with limb difference, but now she is very comfortable showing off Sid too. “It’s a double whammy,” she jokes. “Who doesn’t want someone with one hand and a stoma bag?”She says the reaction from her sto-mates, people who also have stomas, to her being on the show and modelling has been “amazing”. “It can be a bit of a taboo and I think it’s super important that we do advocate for it, especially when it comes to younger people.” Molly says it was a “strange” time between finishing filming The Traitors and it coming out on TV – a gap of several months.”You have this crazy experience and this massive adventure and then that’s it. I was back working as a healthcare assistant at the hospital and you obviously can’t talk to anyone about it.”At that point she was still coming to terms with the treachery Harry Clarke had served her, and which the nation had yet to see.Harry – one of the original three traitors – and, faithful, Mollie were the last players standing, after both voted to eliminate faithful Jaz Singh.In the final moments of the series, Mollie had started to write Harry’s name down for banishment, before changing her mind and voting for Jaz, leaving just her and Harry standing.Her decision meant Harry won all £95,150 of the prize money – as if any traitors remain at the end of the game they take all the gold for themselves.”Me and Harry are fine,” she insists for the umpteenth time since leaving the castle. “As a group we were super close. We were together every day, all day. You do build real bonds and also you don’t have communication with your family and friends, they are your support system.”It’s hard finding out your friend’s been lying to you, but I stuck with my heart and I am not going to hate myself for that.”More on this storyThe Traitors final: I trusted the wrong personPublished2 days ago

Published3 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBy Beth RoseBBC Access AllFormer England striker, Michael Owen, says he would “swap eyes” with his son if it was possible to help the teenager see again.James Owen, 17, who hoped to follow in his father’s footsteps, was diagnosed with Stargardt disease, a degenerative eye condition, when he was eight. Speaking on the BBC Access All podcast, Michael said: “If I could give him my eyes and we could do a swap, I would.”I would pay every cent I’ve got to make James see again.”James is from a legendary footballing family. Michael, played as striker for clubs including Liverpool, Real Madrid and, somewhat controversially went on to play at Liverpool’s north-west rival, Manchester United. His father Terry Owen started his own footballing career at Everton in 1966. The beautiful game was very much in James’s blood, but it slowly dawned on the Owens that something unusual was going on with their young son. James was a nifty player when he was on the ball, but he often failed to track passes or notice player movements further down the field.It became more concerning when he struggled to compete on bigger pitches and it was all getting too fast paced, James admits.At home or on holiday Michael says he often got frustrated when trying to take family photographs as his young son always seemed to look to the side of the camera rather than at it.Even so, Michael says it came as a “hammer-blow” when he and wife Louise were referred to an eye specialist and they were informed of James’s diagnosis.Listen to the Access All podcast with Michael and James Owen, and spot the moment when the tables turn and Michael starts to interview Access All’s blind presenter , Emma Tracey, about her experiences…According to the RNIB, Stargardt disease is an inherited eye condition that affects the macula, the central part of the retina, and causes a reduction in vision there. Understandably, Michael says it left him with parental guilt. “As a parent you just want everything to be perfect – and he is – but of course it was a sad time.”Thinking about the future – will he be able to drive? Will he be able to work? All these things run through your mind.”He says the procedures and tests which followed over the years while medical staff monitored James’s condition were also hard to watch. “You’re pushing your son forward to get something you know is going to be painful. It’s just horrible to see. You want to take all the pain away.”James told Access All presenter Emma Tracey, who is blind herself, that his “central vision is blurry” and that “I struggle with seeing different colours and different lights” although he has “good peripheral vision”.He has learned to adapt to the world around him, by using tricks that other visually impaired people will know well.”I’ll notice what colour my dad’s jumper is. So if I ever go out, then I would be able to recognise him from the colour, not from his face because I struggle with detail.”Michael, who now focuses on training racehorses, says “time is a great healer” and while James had found it difficult to comprehend the diagnosis when he was younger, he has since become very positive about it. “He’s just mentally very, very strong. He’s got a great mindset,” Michael says. “I’ve got four children and I’m probably the least worried about James’s future.”The father and son are about to release their first documentary – Football is for Everyone – exploring James’s sight loss and an adapted version of football called futsal. The duo follow the visually impaired futsal England squad as they compete in the 2023 visually impaired world cup hosted in Birmingham. The game is played on a smaller, indoor, pitch with a heavier ball that doesn’t bounce so much. Players are classified by their visual impairments and only so many players of the same classification can play at once. The goalkeepers are fully sighted but are confined to the goal.When he joined a training session, James quickly got to grips with the game. “I did actually score at some point while training with the England team which I’m quite happy about.” Then he pauses, and confesses. “I actually got megged and then scored an own goal. It was not a great moment.”Michael can’t help but jokingly stick the knife in: “It’s one of the most embarrassing things in football, if you get nutmegged.”Nutmegging, for the uninitiated, is when one player kicks the ball through another player’s legs. Adding an own goal into the mix, just increases the humiliation. “It’s just been a surreal experience,” James says of making the documentary which started before the pandemic. “I used to be quite shy as a kid, but it’s definitely brought me out my shell.”Although he has sidelined football, James says “I’ve got a lot of dreams”. He has found a passion for business, which he is studying at college and hopes to own his own business in the future, although he says he is keeping his options open about what that might be.Michael has a hunch. “When I retire from work in 30 years or something, he’ll probably take over the ‘family empire’,” he laughs. James and Michael’s documentary, Football Is For Everyone is available from the 30th of January on TNT Sports and Discovery Plus. You can listen to the podcast and find information and support on the BBC Access All page.

Published15 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBy Beth RoseBBC Access AllWeight management is a sensitive topic. Nevertheless, the measurement is often used as a marker to inform medical decisions or for someone’s personal interest. But for many wheelchair users, accessing scales has proved near impossible. “The last time I was weighed was about 22 years ago, ” Lizzie tells the BBC podcast, Access All. “I think I was about 15.”As a result, now aged 37, Lizzie has been through three successful pregnancies, all without knowing how her body was adapting or how her baby was growing.Based in Devon, she has a degenerative muscle-related impairment and uses a wheelchair. This makes weighing herself on traditional bathroom scales, which require you to stand still and independently on a small platform, a challenge – although she has given it a go.It involves “sitting down really quickly, lifting my feet up, which is like a ridiculous yoga pose, and trying to balance,” Lizzie says. Unsurprisingly, the reading is never accurate.LISTEN: You can hear more from Lizzie, Dr Georgie Budd and Gillian on the latest episode of Access All. There is equipment out there to help wheelchair users, like Lizzie. Chair scales enable someone to sit on a seat which records their weight and there are similar bed and hoist versions too. There are also wheel-on scales which are very large and involve subtracting the weight of the chair afterwards.But none of these seem widely available. It’s not just in medical settings. Over the past 13 years and after serving 100,000 customers, Ability Superstore, which calls itself the “home of mobility aids” in the UK, said it had never been asked for accessible scales. It believes that comes down to cost – with accessible versions often retailing for hundreds of pounds. Comparatively, your average, everyday scales, can be bought for as little as £9.99.It means many disabled people are going without this benchmark a lot of the population take for granted.Dr Georgie Budd, who is based in Merthyr Tydfil, says this worries her. A wheelchair user herself she appreciates how difficult it can be for people to access scales. “There’s a lot of things that we use weight for in health – anaesthetics and drug dosing – and just to keep an eye on it as well for someone’s general health. During pregnancy for example, if someone was losing weight I, as a GP, would actually be really quite concerned,” she says.Although people can keep across their weight by feeling how their clothes fit, Georgie says this can be inaccurate, especially when clothes are rarely tailored with wheelchair users in mind.But Dr Georgie says weight management can be crucial, especially for those who use wheelchairs.”You’re not using your big leg muscles anymore so you’re not burning as many calories and access to actually exercising as a disabled person is less than I would like it to be.”She says another key factor that is lost due to inaccessibility is motivation. Gillian Morphy knows about that. She had her right leg amputated a year ago due to dystonia, which causes uncontrolled and sometimes painful muscle movements. She is trying to lose weight, but was last weighed at her local amputee clinic six months ago.”Every [medical] appointment you go to you’re told ‘you’ve got to lose weight’. But we’re not helped, nobody’s telling me how,” she says.Gillian says losing weight has become even more important to her since the amputation. “I don’t want to be putting so much weight through my left leg because I don’t want to cause any problems there.”She says she would like to be weighed weekly to “know which direction I’m heading in”. Image source, GillianGillian can get weighed at the amputee clinic, but it’s not somewhere she can just drop into plus she relies on patient transport which can involve a lot of waiting around. “For two minutes on the scales, that could take me six hours,” she says. More generally, there seems to be little information out there on how Gillian, Lizzie and their medical teams can measure weight and access scales. Neither NHS England nor the government have guidance for doctors nor advice on what equipment to use and no figures are kept on how many hospitals have access to such equipment and where they are.The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) previously considered the issue in 2014 and requested more research be carried out. But so far nothing has been started. Lizzie’s healthcare trust – Devon Integrated Care Board, which covers Devon, Torbay and Plymouth – says it does have equipment which enables weight to be measured “safely and with dignity”. But Lizzie is yet to have been offered the use of it.Gillian wonders if more simple solutions could be found, such as doctor surgeries clubbing together to buy accessible scales for the local area. Her next appointment at the amputee clinic is fast approaching and, unlike many people, she’s looking forward to getting on the scales and seeing what progress she has made with losing weight. “After that it won’t be until Christmas that I get weighed, and then it could be another six months.”You can listen to the podcast and find information and support on the BBC Access All page. If you’ve got a story get in touch with Beth by emailing bethany.rose@bbc.co.uk.

Published12 minutes agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingBy Beth RoseBBC Access AllKnown for making documentaries with some of the most notorious criminals in the world, investigative journalist Livvy Haydock had a shock closer to home when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS). But she found support from the most unlikely people – the criminals she interviews. “I’ve always been told I’m not scared of anything, but this MS terrifies me,” Livvy admits. “I feel so small.”The 38-year-old has lived an edgy life, producing and presenting documentaries on topics from girl gangs to child soldiers in the Congo. Her latest hit is Gangster: The story of John Palmer for BBC Sounds, which investigates his involvement in the 1983 Brink’s-Mat gold bullion robbery – the largest armed robbery in British history.It was her love of American rap music as a teenager that formed her fascination with the criminal underground, gangs and violence.”I wanted to understand it,” she says. “A lot of the time, people who are committing crimes don’t get to talk about it from their perspective.”It has helped her understand what motivates them to take such risks – and how sometimes the choices can appear “logical” to them.It was while Livvy was investigating the war on drugs in the Philippines in 2016 that a plot twist in her own life began to unfold.”There was something really wrong with my legs,” she tells BBC Access All. “I was sure it was dodgy food.”Livvy finished her film and returned to the UK, but the symptoms persisted. Over the next four years she made several trips to the doctor but never got a diagnosis. In 2020 it was suggested she undergo a lumbar puncture – a test of her spinal fluid – to “rule out MS”. But the result confirmed the very opposite. MS occurs when the protective layer surrounding nerve fibres – myelin – becomes damaged and stops messages flowing between the brain and body. It can affect the spinal cord and impact vision, movement and balance. After a call from a neurologist confirming Livvy did have MS, she was told she would receive another phone call, within the week, to plan her treatment. But weeks passed and no phone call came, all while she was trying to hold it together. “It was like I’d been given a grenade,” she says.She distracted herself by focusing on the documentary she was working on about kidnap gangs – “It was easier to think about,” she says.But by Christmas, “the grenade exploded”, and a minor family disagreement turned into “something out of EastEnders”.LISTEN: You can hear more from Livvy on the BBC Access All podcast.And Claire, a wheelchair-user, reveals she has been waiting for her social housing property to be adapted for more than three years, despite the council signing off the work in 2019.The nurse did eventually call, and when Livvy started to process the diagnosis she knew she would have to consider her future very carefully, especially when it came to her dangerous investigations. She’s lost count of the number of freezing nights she’s waited outside for dealers to appear for interviews. “They’re the most unreliable people in the world,” she jokes. She often tells late-comers off for the pain they have caused her. But her work has also been her salvation – not just as something she can lose herself in, but as an unlikely source of support and empathy. “I come across lots of disability within the world of crime,” she says. “At one point the majority of the gang members I interviewed were either in wheelchairs or had ongoing medical issues from gunshot wounds.”Sickle-cell disease is one disabling condition she comes across frequently. It causes red blood cells to distort and become sticky, blocking vessels and restricting oxygen supply, which triggers excruciating pain.One of her contacts was receiving treatment for it in hospital when he became the victim of a honey trap. A rival gang sent him Instagram messages, pretending to be a woman and saying how “hot” he was.”He’s in the hospital and says ‘Come see me,’ so the rival gang went to see him in hospital and attacked him. It was outrageous,” she says.Another of her favourite contacts to talk to about life with a disability is a reformed gang member based in the US. At the height of his notoriety he ran 30 drug-houses in Dallas. Then his gang turned on him.”They shot him in the head – that bullet went straight through both optic nerves and they left him to die. He somehow managed to get up, and he’s now completely blind,” she says.Some of the criminals Livvy speaks to are also carers for their disabled friends and family. “So many youngsters are looking after their parents. I won’t justify their crimes with it, but it’s having that insight into what is pushing them into needing money,” she says. Livvy’s MS affects her legs, vision and she gets shooting pains down her sides like “electric shocks” – a well-known MS symptom.She can also struggle with finding the right words – “I end up saying bizarre sentences because the messages in my brain don’t work.”Her treatment involves an infusion every six weeks to help reduce the amount of damage and scarring to the myelin sheath.The condition has also raised other issues she wasn’t expecting to confront, like whether to tell prospective partners about her MS. “It’s hard enough trying to date,” she says. “I want to meet someone and settle down, but this feels against me.”As a freelancer, she’s now having to rethink her life-plan and career, to ensure she manages her money, health and safety in her unusual job.”It’s a tough industry and I’m always scared to take time off,” she says. “You don’t say no to jobs because you worry they won’t ask again.”But even if her career does take a different turn, she plans to continue confiding in her contacts who understand what she’s going through.”There’s a gentleman I know who spent an awful lot of time in prison and actually fell off his bunk which caused horrendous injuries to his back. We talk quite a lot because we can relate so much. “It’s quite funny, we go from talking about robberies to ‘How’s your health?'” You can listen to the podcast and find information and support on the Access All page.

Published3 hours agoShareclose panelShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, iSABEL HOLDSWORTHBy Beth RoseBBC Access AllIn early January a shortage of available guide dogs was reported. For some visually impaired people the wait is too long and they decide to train their own guide dogs.Isabel Holdsworth had been making the daily commute across London from Dagenham to Kings Cross for years. Being visually impaired she had worked with five different guide dogs, until it came to a sad and abrupt end.”My dog died suddenly and I had to go to work and college the next day – two tubes, a 40 minute walk – with no dog,” she told BBC Access All.She used her white cane instead, knowing it could be a long time before she was matched with another dog. But it wasn’t easy. “I was on Liverpool Street Station and almost fell in front of the Tube,” she says. “I thought ‘I can’t do this anymore’.”She had an idea – could she train her own dog?It’s not a common way to go about it, but for years people have been doing this. The big question for guide dog owners is, if a dog is self-trained and not accredited by a big organisation, will they be allowed to take it to places dogs can’t usually go, like restaurants, shops and in taxis? The answer is yes, the law doesn’t make a distinction. Isabel started researching the possibility of training her own dog and spoke to others who had done so.She felt confident she could also do this and began searching rescue centres until she found Lucy, a one-year-old Labrador. Lucy hadn’t had the best start in life with little socialisation and family life but Isabel felt she had found the right dog. Having taken Lucy home, Isabel invested in a training clicker and food to reward Lucy and then booked a weeks leave from work to get started. Image source, iSABEL HOLDSWORTHAbigail Hughes understands Isabel’s drive to do this. She co-founded PAWtected, an organisation that works with about 80 people every year to train their own assistance dogs. She says she started offering online and in-person courses when she realised dogs weren’t always available for people who needed support, including autistic adults. “You’ve got lesser-known dogs like allergen detection dogs, so that you don’t come into contact with something you’re severely allergic to,” she says. “There are dogs who can help with PTSD and other traumatic circumstances.”Back in London, Isabel ventured out with Lucy. She had bought a harness and, armed with her trusty cane which she used at the same time, they started walking the street they lived on. One of the first tasks was to teach Lucy to avoid obstacles. Isabel knew there was a lamppost on her road so she braced herself then “smacked into it and jumped back” yelping in pain. LISTEN: You can hear more from Isabel and Abigail on the BBC Access All podcast.Radio 1Xtra’s Reece Parkinson also chats about his recent diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes and how he manages his blood sugar while DJ-ing in Ibiza. Isabel made a huge deal about the pain hoping Lucy would take note. Then they tried the approach again.”Lucy did a great big wide circuit around it. I didn’t really have any problem with obstacles after that.”This isn’t a standard way to train assistance dogs. It’s usually pain-free and involves lots of repetition and positive reinforcement with treats. Crossing roads was another essential and involved Lucy trying to learn that she mustn’t always follow the commands her owner gives her because it might be dangerous – something called “intelligent disobedience”. That means if Isabel instructs Lucy to cross the road but there’s a car coming, Lucy must refuse. Being a trainer who is blind, Isabel had to ensure she knew the layout of the road and where cars might appear before practising.She says it took about four months until she had “absolute trust” in her dog. But it paid off. When Isabel hadn’t heard a quiet electric car approaching, Lucy stopped Isabel from getting hit. Isabel’s aim had always been to get back to commuting with a dog and after just seven days of training she felt Lucy had learned enough to set them on their way. But returning to the office wasn’t all plain sailing.”The first day Lucy went into the office, she pulled down the soft walls between the offices. She ate through the boss’s phone cable and network cable.”Happily the company was understanding. Isabel says it took about two years to fully train Lucy. It’s a similar length of time that Guide Dogs, the UKs biggest provider of assistance dogs, takes to train its puppies before they are matched with a partner. Image source, PAWtectedGuide Dogs is currently struggling to meet demand. The Covid pandemic paused breeding, training and socialising for five months. As well as fewer dogs, the number of those making it through the process dropped from 65% to less than 50% – the lowest in decades – and the average waiting time for a guide dog increased to 18 months.The organisation said it was “devastated” by this, in its annual report. “In all our 90 years, we have never had two years as tumultuous and challenging as 2020 and 2021.”One way it is trying to mitigate this, and to diversify its gene pools, is by working with international partners. In 2022 it received dogs from America, Japan and Finland.Tim Stafford, its director of canine affairs, says dogs bring “incredible benefits” to a person’s life” but he believes guide dogs should be independently assessed rather than owner-trained to “provide clarity, reassure the public and service providers”.Although receivers of many guide dogs are used to getting dogs from a big charity, many other assistance dog charities are not so big and so the onus is on disabled people to obtain and train their own dogs.Abigail says PAWtected has helped hundreds of people and on a practical level it can be quite “simple” to start training a dog for tasks such as taking your socks off.”You start off by playing a game of tug with the sock,” she says. “Then you put the sock on your foot, leaving a tail at the end, and encourage them to play tug at the end of your foot so that they can pull it off. It builds up really slowly through fun games.”For Isabel the hundreds of hours of training paid off. “Lucy was the best guide dog I ever had,” she says, but adds that time and expense, such as vet bills and public liability insurance, need to be factored in before anyone attempts it. “It’s not an easy thing to do but it’s not impossible for a blind person to train their own dog. It’s the buzziest feeling ever.” You can listen to the podcast and find information and support on the Access All pageMore on this storyWhat does it take to raise a guide dog puppy?4 days agoRelated Internet LinksPAWtectedGuide DogsThe BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.