Longmont resident Sherry Gomes and her guide dog, Shani, recently graduated from the nation’s leading guide dog school, Guiding Eyes for the Blind. Gomes is one of two specialized training program graduates so far in 2021. Despite the pandemic, there were 30 graduates from the program in 2020.
Gomes, who has had good friends in Longmont since 1997, moved to the city from California in 2009.
“I love living in Colorado, I love the fact that we have four seasons which you don’t really get in California,” she said.
While living in California, Gomes first heard about Guiding Eyes for the Blind from friends who had had positive experiences with the program.
Fast forward more than a decade and it was Melissa Smith who conducted her interview and accepted her into the program. Smith would later become Gomes’ mobility instructor as well.
“My primary role is to support all of our graduates that are already out existing in the field, also to assess and interview new applicants for guide dogs,” Smith said. “And then I do home trainings, like what I did with Sherry.”
Smith’s interest in guide dogs started in seventh grade, when she read a book about a blind woman in Europe, setting her on the path to raising puppies, she said.
“I actually started raising puppies as a volunteer for the first year of their life to set them up to become a guide dog. I did that at the age of 14 and I’ve raised, I think throughout my childhood and my career, I’ve raised about 14 puppies,” Smith said.
Gomes’ interest in guide dogs also began when she read a book. In 1965, at 7 years old, Gomes read “Follow My Leader” in braille, a story about a boy who receives his first guide dog.
“I didn’t know very much at the time about what independent mobility for a blind person meant, but I knew that when I was old enough I was going to get a guide dog and I never turned away from that dream,” Gomes said. “It was 1975 when I got my first dog.”
Gomes was born with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, a condition causing chronic pain in her hips and legs and limited range of motion in certain joints. At 3 years old, she had surgery to have her right knee fused. By 5 years old her rheumatoid arthritis started to affect her optic nerves.
“I figure I got out pretty lucky with just the optic nerve being damaged,” she said, citing that juvenile rheumatoid arthritis can cause damage to the heart, kidney, and liver as well.
Because Gomes deals with another condition in addition to being blind, she was more drawn to Guiding Eyes for the Blind, she said.
“Guiding Eyes has a specialized training program where the dogs are picked specifically for a person with certain other disabilities or issues besides just being blind, so I felt like that was a good match for me,” Gomes said. “The last dog I had from a previous school was not safe for me, she had what we call a serious dog distraction problem.”
Dogs that go through the Guiding Eyes program receive extensive training, but with positive reinforcement.
“Typically the dogs are issued when they’re about 2 years old, so they’re in their puppy raising home for a year, then they go to their formal harness training for about six months or so,” Smith said.
Gomes and Shani’s case was different, though. Shani is a 5½-year-old yellow Labrador retriever that previously worked with another owner. However, when Shani’s owner’s health started to decline, she made the difficult decision to return the dog to Guiding Eyes, Smith said.
“Normally we don’t even really reissue dogs over the age of 4, but in Sherry and Shani’s case it was just too perfect to pass up,” Smith said.
After Gomes’ experience with her guide dog with a distraction problem, she also returned the dog to it’s program and was without a guide dog for a year and a half, the longest she’s ever gone without one since 1975, she said.
“Especially with COVID our waitlist doubled, so if it weren’t for Shani I don’t know how long Sherry might continue to wait for a new dog,” Smith said.
When Gomes met Shani for the first time, it felt like the first time she ever walked with a guide dog, she said.
“I felt from the first walk ... she was going to be a dog I could count on and trust to be careful with me, to watch out for the things that make me stumble or fall and that we were going to be a great match,” Gomes said.
It’s not only Shani’s work that makes her a great match for Gomes; her personality and companionship also make the Lab a perfect fit, Gomes said.
“She loves to be hugged and pet and she sleeps on my bed right next to me at night, usually with her head on me somewhere,” she said. “She is just 100% a delightful dog, everything about her.”
Once things open back up, Gomes said she is excited to take Shani to see musical theater shows, something Gomes has enjoyed since early high school. In her free time Gomes also enjoys writing, which she has done since childhood, hoping to be an author or publisher someday, she said. She just completed one romance novel and is working on her second.
“My parents raised me to believe that blindness did not have to stop me, that I could do and be anything I wanted to be and that I didn’t need to feel like because I was blind I wasn’t as good as anybody else,” Gomes said.
Computer word processing programs have made her dream much easier, allowing her to skip the step of writing in Braille and then typing on a manual typewriter. Although both of Gomes’ novels feature blind characters the stories do not center around their blindness, she said.
“I want people when they read, as they read, to forget this character is blind and to just think ‘This is a great story’ or ‘I can relate to this woman’ and see blind characters going through normal things — working, raising children, falling in love, having conflict with that and resolving it,” Gomes said.
Looking toward the future, Gomes is looking forward to the newfound freedom Shani will bring her as businesses and theaters start opening up, and is especially thankful to Smith and the team at Guiding Eyes for the Blind.
“I’m just so thankful to Guiding Eyes and Melissa for giving me this dog. I’m not one to be overly gushy about an organization, but they really gave me my life back when they gave me this dog and I’m very thankful and very happy,” Gomes said.
****
Correction: Gomes is one of two 2021 Guiding Eyes for the Blind specialized training program graduates. That information was incorrect in the original posting of this story.
