TW: mention of going into crisis and hospitals

Hi everyone! I'll try to keep this short but this was a big step in my recovery and treatment and wanted to share.

I'm 24 with multiple diagnoses, and about a year ago I adopted a dog and began training her to be my service animal. Her tasks include behavior interruption, deep pressure therapy, and she helps me determine if I'm hallucinating. 

She has been doing really well with her behavior interruption and only occasionally needs a verbal command for her to to do it properly, most of the time she does it on her own. We're definitely still working on the deep pressure therapy thing though, we've had some struggles with that.

There have been times over the last year when I've questioned making the decision to take on this task. While I was fairly stable at the time, I knew it probably wasn't going to last. That kind of training takes a lot if work, and I've had several periods where I was pretty sick. And I've been feeling kind of bad about not making more progress and like maybe I'm not going to be able to do it. Until last night.

Things have been pretty bad recently. Last night I started having hospital anxiety, which is when I know I'm in crisis. About when I started thinking about having to call for help, my dog started jumping on me and barking which is my cue to usually just sit down so I'm closer to her, but she made me lay down and got on me exactly how she should and stayed there until I was okay.

She has never done this correctly while actively training, let alone without any direct commands. It was amazing. This is a huge step in our training and showed me that she's going to be able to do this. 

I'm proud of us.