My Dog Is My Hero: A Guide Dog Navigates the World and Stars in a New Documentary
Janet Gearhart uses a lot of adjectives to describe her guide dog Poppet.
The 3-year-old black Labrador retriever is “delightful,” “wonderful” and “friendly.” But Gearhart, a retired program director for the visually impaired, can think of only one adjective to describe life without Poppet: “Awful.”Diagnosed in her early 30s with retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited degenerative eye disease, Gearhart, now 69, has been gradually losing her peripheral vision.
Today that loss is so severe that she can no longer distinguish facial features.
When she was first diagnosed, Gearhart, who lives in Oakdale, California, navigated the world with a cane or help from her husband,