Thunder Dog

by Michael Hingson

  THUNDER DOG

  THUNDER DOG

  THE TRUE STORY OF

  A BLIND MAN, HIS GUIDE DOG,

  AND THE TRIUMPH OF

  TRUST AT GROUND ZERO

  MICHAEL HINGSON

  with SUSY FLORY

  © 2011 by Michael Hingson

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

  Author is represented by the literary agency of MacGregor Literary.

  Thomas Nelson, Inc., titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please e-mail SpecialMarkets@ ThomasNelson.com.

  Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are taken from THE NEW KING JAMES VERSION. © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hingson, Michael, 1950–

  Thunder dog : the true story of a blind man, his guide dog, and the triumph of trust at ground zero/ by Michael Hingson with Susy Flory.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-4002-0304-8

  1. Hingson, Michael, 1950– 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Personal narratives. 3. Blind—United States—Biography. 4. Human-animal relationships. I. Flory, Susy, 1965– II. Title.

  HV6432.7.H54 2011

  974.7'1044092—dc22

  [B]

  2010052479

  Printed in the United States of America

  11 12 13 14 15 16 QGF 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Karen, my best friend, my world, and the rock who kept me grounded after 9/11.

  For Hazel tenBroek. Hazel, I never got to meet Chick, but through you and your stories, I got to know and admire him and his teachings. For a guy who university intellectuals said could never be a law student due to blindness, he certainly went on to become one of the most respected constitutional law scholars in the U.S. And to think he put his wisdom to work founding and building the National Federation of the Blind. Thank you for sharing him with me and so many others over the past quarter century.

  —Michael

  For Gini Monroe, my favorite cowgirl, friend, and mentor.

  —Susy

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Introduction

  The Real Story

  ONE Day of Thunder

  TWO 1,463 Stairs

  THREE My Other Soul Mate

  FOUR Hearing the Coffee Table

  FIVE Kicked off the Bus

  SIX Driving in the Dark

  SEVEN Warriors with Guide Dogs

  EIGHT I Forgot You Are Blind

  NINE Running with Roselle

  TEN We Are Pretty Much Just Like You

  ELEVEN Woman on Wheels

  TWELVE A Brush and a Booda Bone

  THIRTEEN Shake Off the Dust

  FOURTEEN It’s All Worth It

  Acknowledgments

  Timeline for September 11, 2001

  The Courtesy Rules for Blindness

  Blindness: A Left-Handed Dissertation

  by Kenneth Jernigan

  Resources for Blindness

  Notes

  Glossary of Terms Related to Blindness

  For Further Reading

  About the Authors

  FOREWORD

  by Larry King

  The sighted can only imagine what it is like to be blind. Close your eyes for a minute or two and walk through your house. For a moment, imagine it for a lifetime. Then specifically imagine being with your trusted guide dog, Roselle, working seventy-eight floors above the ground at the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001.

  Thunder Dog is an incredible story of Michael Hingson and Roselle as they descend down those seventy-eight floors, helping dozens of others to escape a collapsing building. Down a stairway, desperate but calm at the same time. You will read of unforgettable moments, reflecting the blind experience with the emphasis on the senses rather than the visual. You will live again the tragedy and triumph of September 11.

  Thunder Dog celebrates the power of the human and animal bond. And, we all can learn life lessons from this incredible story.

  I had the honor of hosting Michael on Larry King Live five different times, and each time, he brought his guide dog with him. Viewers relived the story over and over again and never seemed to get enough. Since then, Michael has become an international hero with appearances all over the world. He has been honored by many organizations, and in July 2010 was the keynote speaker for the National Federation of the Blind’s annual conference in Dallas.

  Chapter by chapter of this intriguing work will keep you spellbound. You will relive 1,463 steps as a blind man and his dog triumph over adversity. Settle in, for you are about to read a page-turner.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Real Story

  I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “He is permanently and totally blind. There is nothing we can do for him.”

  George and Sarah Hingson looked at each other, devastated. Their six-month-old son, Michael, was a happy, strawberry blond baby boy, healthy and normal in every way except one. When the Hingsons switched on a light or made silly faces, Michael did not react. Ever.

  Michael Hingson was born in 1950, and he was fifty-nine days early. Back then, standard medical procedure was to put a premature baby in a sealed incubator and pump in pure oxygen until the baby’s lungs matured. The practice had been in place for years and resulted in an epidemic of blindness in preterm babies born before thirty-two weeks gestation. An eye disease called retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), formerly called retrolental fibro-plasia, was to blame.

  Arnall Patz, a doctor and research professor at Johns Hopkins University, discovered the cause of ROP. It turned out that extreme oxygen therapy caused blood vessels in the back of the eye to constrict. The eye, in an attempt to compensate, produced a tangled mess of blood vessels that leaked blood, scarring and subsequently destroying the retina.

  Mr. and Mrs. Hingson had watched as the doctor dilated Michael’s eyes, then examined each retina with a special lighted instrument called an indirect ophthalmoscope to determine how far the retinal blood vessels had grown. The prognosis for ROP is indicated by the stage. A diagnosis of stage 1 or 2 means the condition is less severe and will not lead to blindness. The higher the stage, the worse the prognosis. Michael was diagnosed as stage 4, meaning almost total retinal detachment, resulting in nearly complete loss of vision. The retina functions much like film in a camera, creating an image of the visual world in layers of neurons and synapses that capture light for the brain to encode and process. No retinal function means no visual information is transmitted to the brain. Michael’s condition was irreversible.

  Before Dr. Patz proved his controversial theory in clinical trials, funded by money borrowed from his brother, more than ten thousand premature babies in the United States went blind between 1941 and 1953. Michael was one of those babies. So were actor Tom Sullivan, musician Stevie Wonder, and National Federation of the Blind president Dr. Marc Maurer. So many children were blinded in the early ’50s that the average age of blind people in America dropped from seventy to sixty-five years.

  “My best suggestion is that you send him to a home for the blind,” the doctor continued after examining Michael. “The specialists there will be able to take care of him.” The words took on edges and cut deep grooves of shock and grief into the Hingsons’ hearts
. “He will never be able to do anything for himself because of his blindness. If you keep him at home, he will only be a burden on your family.”

  Like most people, the Hingsons had never really been around a blind person before. But they were down-to-earth people who thought for themselves and made up their own minds. George, a self-taught television repairman with an eighth-grade education, and Sarah, a high school graduate with a beautician’s license, decided to ignore the doctor. They loved Michael just the same as they loved his two-year-old brother, Ellery. No matter what the experts said, they were not going to send their beloved younger son away to a strange place far from home and family. There had to be a better way. Instinctively, the Hingsons knew that sight was not the only pathway to learning.

  From the beginning, Michael was treated no differently from his brother. He was encouraged, nurtured, and loved. He was expected to grow and learn like any other child. He was allowed to explore the neighborhood on his own two feet, on his bicycle, and then with a guide dog. He never went to a school for the blind or lived in a community set apart. He never felt handicapped or disabled. He knew he was different, but he decided not to let it stop him. Ultimately, through his parents’ decision to ignore the doctor’s strongly worded recommendation, Michael was given the chance to grow up and find his own way in a world not set up for someone like him.

  This is the story of a man blind from birth who triumphed over adversity throughout his life. His hard-won survival skills and his feisty, can-do spirit prepared him to survive the World Trade Center attacks in a seventy-eight-story stairwell descent with his guide dog, Roselle. Michael’s blindness didn’t stop him from shocking the neighbors by riding his bicycle through the streets of Palmdale, California, as a child, and on September 11 his blindness became an asset as he survived and helped others during the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil.

  Yet, there’s more. “The real story, in my mind, isn’t how I got out of the World Trade Center,” said Michael. “It’s how I got there in the first place.”

  Forty-seven years after the birth of Michael Hingson, a yellow Labrador retriever puppy was born in the whelping unit of Guide Dogs for the Blind in San Rafael, California. The puppy’s name was Roselle, and she, too, was blind from birth. But sometime between her third and fourth week, she opened her eyes. On September 11, 2001, she saved Michael’s life. This is Roselle’s story too.

  THUNDER DOG

  1

  DAY OF THUNDER

  The bond with a dog is as lasting as

  the ties of this earth can ever be.

  KONRAD LORENZ

  September 11, 2001: I can feel her body quivering. It’s twelve thirty in the morning, and Roselle is afraid of the thunder. Again.

  Drowsy, I prop myself up on one elbow and reach down to stroke her back, then touch her ears. I finger their velvety softness. She reaches up and noses my hand. Usually her nose feels cool and wet, but this time it feels warm. She’s panting, and her damp, foggy breath hangs in the air between us.

  I hear the rhythmic breathing of Karen, my wife. Good, she’s still asleep.

  Roselle’s quivering becomes shaking, and I know I’ll have to get up. I lie back for a moment and listen. I hear the wind testing the windows but nothing else yet. Roselle knows a storm is brewing. She usually gets nervous about thirty minutes before the thunder rolls in.

  I yawn and rub my face, trying to wake up. My alarm is set for 5:00, and I realize that by the time I get up with Roselle, wait out the storm with her, and get her back to bed, I’m not going to get much sleep. She stands up and begins to pant again. I sit up and rub Roselle’s chin and neck, then push my feet into my slippers and stand up, grabbing my robe. Roselle rubs against my legs, happy that she won’t have to face this storm alone. Her powerful Labrador retriever tail slaps against my knees once or twice as I follow her out of the room.

  We head down the hallway, partly open to the first floor, then down sixteen stairs. The wooden banister feels cooler down toward the bottom. I remember hearing yesterday on the news that this storm is a cold one, blowing down from Canada and bringing the first touch of autumn to Westfield, New Jersey.

  Roselle’s nails tap rhythmically as she crosses the oak floor in the entryway, passes the elevator door, and heads down the steps to the basement. I follow, listening for differences in the air that keep me oriented to the three-dimensional floor plan of our house.

  I first began to hear my surroundings when I was four years old. Someone gave me a kiddie car that I could drive around the apartment. I quickly learned to work the pedals and tore through the rooms at high speed. One day, while out for a spin in the living room, I drove right into the coffee table. The hood of the car was just the right height to slide underneath, and my face slammed into the edge of the table. One hospital emergency room visit and three stitches in my chin later, I faced the wrath of Mom. I suppose she could have taken away the car to make sure I never had another accident, but she didn’t. “Mike, you’re going to have to do a better job of watching where you’re going,” she said. A funny thing to say to a blind kid, but what she meant was that I should listen better. So I did.

  Thanks in part to Mom’s encouragement, in part to my just working at it, and in large part to the desire to avoid more trips to the emergency room, I began to pay more attention to what I could tell about my surroundings through my ears. And somehow I learned to hear the coffee table as I approached it. I could hear a change as I passed from one room to another. When I walked, I could hear a doorway. As I continued to race around in my pedal car, my confidence grew, and I learned to get beyond the need for eyesight. How many other four-year-olds can race their pedal cars around the house at high speed in the pitch dark? Not the light-dependent ones.

  As I follow Roselle down the stairs to my basement office, I begin to hear the first deep rumbles of the approaching thunderstorm. Roselle dives under my desk and begins panting again, this time faster and louder. She is one of the most easygoing dogs I’ve ever known, but thunder spooks her. It’s funny, though; Roselle has guided me during storms, and even though she doesn’t like it, her guide dog training prevails and she guides well.

  No one knows for sure why some dogs are terrified of thunderstorms. It may be that they are more sensitive to drops in barometric pressure. Or perhaps, because dogs hear at much higher and lower frequencies, they are simply hearing the storm before we do. Another possibility is that dogs can smell a storm. Lightning ionizes air with the formation of ozone, which has a characteristic metallic smell.1 But more likely it has to do with changes in the static electric field that precedes a storm. An electrical engineer named Tom Critzer had a dog named Cody with a severe storm phobia much like Roselle’s, so he designed a cape with a special metallic lining that discharges the dog’s fur and shields it from the static charge buildup. I don’t have a magical thunder cape for Roselle but I do crank up the volume of a radio news program to help mask the rumbling and booming.

  As we wait through the storm together in the dark, Roselle cocooned at my feet, I turn on my computer and do some work to pass the time. Between the noise of the radio, my fingers tapping on the keyboard, and the rhythmic mutter of my screen reader, Roselle stops shaking, and I can sense her body starting to relax. I don’t mind having the extra time to finish preparing for my morning meeting. We’re expecting fifty guests for four sales training sessions, and as regional sales manager, I’m in charge of the presentation.

  An hour and a half later, the thunderstorm has passed, and Roselle and I head back upstairs to bed. In less than six hours, we’ll be at the World Trade Center.

  We have a big day ahead.

  2

  1,463 STAIRS

  It was one of those moments in which history splits,

  and we define the world as “before” and “after.”

  NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL,

  SEPTEMBER 12, 2001

  Roselle is under my desk again. This time she’s not quaking i
n fear but snoozing, as only dogs can, in utter relaxation. I’m scrambling to get ready for the morning sales training sessions.

  It’s already been a very busy morning. Between sitting up with Roselle during the storm and then getting up just a few hours later, at 5 a.m., I almost wish I’d had black coffee instead of my usual PG tips tea, but I am a tea drinker first and foremost.

  Because of the scheduled meetings, I had set my alarm for a little earlier than usual. I needed to get to work early and make sure everything was perfect for both the presentation and the breakfast. I was looking forward to serving what I thought were the best ham and cheese croissants in New York City, ordered from the forty-fourth-floor Port Authority cafeteria called the Sky Dive.

  While I’d shaved, showered, and dressed, Roselle had continued sleeping on her blanket next to the bed. She’s probably still worn out from dealing with the thunderstorm. I let her sleep as long as I could. When it was time to go downstairs and eat, Roselle tracked my movements as usual, running ahead of me down the hallway and then downstairs to the kitchen. Since we did not have a fenced-in yard, I first took her outside on leash to relieve herself then came back in and turned on the TV. While I started in on a bowl of Special K, I listened to the news. My mind was on the morning meetings, but in the background I heard reports on the primaries; by the end of the day we’d know who was going to replace Mayor Giuliani. I got up and let Roselle back in. She grabbed her favorite Nylabone and played quietly while I finished breakfast.

  A few minutes before six, I called Roselle and buckled up her harness. She has a pixielike personality, energetic and fun loving. She plays whenever she can and works when she has to. But the leather guide dog harness is like Roselle’s uniform; when she wears it, her behavior changes. She becomes less bouncy, more focused, and she always takes her job seriously. She demands that I do my job too. And she loves being part of a team.