When A&E doctor Amit Patel lost his sight seven years ago, he also lost his confidence – until a guide dog changed everything. He tells Emma Higginbotham the story.
A year after losing his sight, Dr Amit Patel picked up his white cane and set out on his first unaccompanied trip – a ride on London’s Docklands Light Railway. It didn’t go well.
“I was beaming inside, feeling like a scared boy because I’m on my own, but thinking ‘I can do this’,” he recalls. “I’m standing just by the door, in dark glasses, holding my white cane in front of me. So when a man starts shouting ‘Are you staring at me?’, I had no idea that he’d be talking to me. Then he shoved me.”
Amit fell to the floor. “I thought give it a second, somebody will say ‘I’ll give you a hand up’, or intervene, but the fact that nobody did really shocked me.” He stumbled off at the next stop, “and I thought if I’m going to do this, I’m going to have to be a lot stronger. It took me three months to build up that courage again.”
Amit, 41, was studying medicine at Cambridge University when he first noticed a problem with his his eyes. Plagued by migraines, he was eventually diagnosed with keratoconus, a condition that causes the cornea (the transparent covering of the iris) to protrude. Losing his sight, he says, was “the last thing on my mind. I knew that in the future I might need a corneal transplant, but only if it got really bad.”
Unfortunately it did. Amit’s first transplant went well, but his body soon rejected it. He had more, but each time, the same thing happened. Meanwhile he carried on working as an A&E doctor, and met and married his wife, Seema. But waking up one morning, he couldn’t focus at all.
“It was as if I was looking through really dirty glass,” he recalls. “I always had issues in the morning, so that wasn’t a shock; it was only when Seema saw blood on the pillow that we started worrying.”
They went to hospital, his eyes still bleeding. “The only thing they could do was bandage them up. And that was it. By the time the bandages came off, all I could see was a grey-blue mist.”
It transpired that blood vessels bursting in his eyes had caused irreparable damage, and Amit’s sight loss was permanent. He was devastated. “I couldn’t sleep, and it was hard to know when it was night or day – it was just an endless time for me. I’m generally very outgoing and confident, but I kind of lost who I was.”
With the help of counselling, over the next few months Amit gradually became more positive, eventually putting himself on the waiting list for a guide dog.
By coincidence, Kika was born in the same month that Amit lost his sight. Strong-willed and cheeky, the charity thought that she’d be a good match for him, but he still had reservations. “I just didn’t know whether I could trust a dog with my life,” he admits.
They went to a hotel to train together, and on the third day, Kika blocked him from going into the bathroom. Frustrated, Amit thought she was just being stubborn. It turned out that the bathroom had flooded, and Kika was saving him from potentially slipping over. “That’s when I knew,” he says. “She barely knows me, yet she’s looking out for me.”
Having Kika, says Amit, has given him back both his independence and his confidence. “It’s crazy if you think, you leave your house every day with a dog, and you come home every day safe and well, and you’ve explored London, or Europe, or jumped on a plane and done New York. She was that missing cog, that one thing I needed.”
With Kika’s help, Amit – who has a son, Abhi, 4, and daughter Anoushka, nearly 2 – is now a disability rights activist. He campaigns for better services, talks to companies about hiring visually impaired staff (25% of those with sight loss of working age are unemployed), and simply educates people who can’t quite grasp the concept. “I remember at the hospital when my son was born, a gentleman came over and said ‘I didn’t realise blind people could have kids’. Is this what people really think?” he says, laughing incredulously.
One way of raising awareness is by strapping a camera to Kika; videos of commuters behaving badly – from trying to barge past him on escalators to not giving up seats – have gone viral on social media. And he hopes his memoir Kika & Me, out now in paperback, will challenge and change people’s misconceptions.
“Having a disability doesn’t stop you living the life you want to live,” he says. “I do things differently, and we have to plan a lot more, but that’s about it.
“I am blind, but my life is amazing! I’ve got two crazy kids, one amazing guide dog and a fabulous wife. My life isn’t the way I thought it would be, but do you know what? It’s probably better.”
:: Kika & Me: How One Extraordinary Guide Dog Changed My World is out now
A guide to guide dogs
The earliest known representation of a guide dog is on a 2,000-year-old mural in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum. It shows a raggedly-dressed man carrying a staff, representing his blindness, with a small dog on a lead.
The first formal training of guide dogs began at a hospital for the blind in 18th century Paris, and during the First World War, guide dogs were trained to help German soldiers blinded by poisonous gas in the trenches.
US guide dog charity The Seeing Eye was co-founded in the 1920s by Morris Frank. Morris, who was blind, became a celebrity when hundreds watched his guide dog Buddy navigate him across New York’s busy West Street, known locally as ‘Death Avenue’.
Inspired by The Seeing Eye, in 1931 dog breeders Muriel Crooke and Rosamund Bond started training four of their German shepherds from a lock-up garage in Merseyside. Three years later they became The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association.
Over the last 90 years, Guide Dogs has partnered more than 36,000 people with assistance dogs, and at any one time is responsible for 8,400 dogs and puppies. Currently the youngest guide dog owner is 14, and the oldest is 97.
Three pups that were unsuitable as guide dogs have been recruited for a trial to see whether they can detect people with Covid-19 in public places. The trial is being run by Medical Detection Dogs, a charity that trains animals to detect diseases in humans through smell.
An edited version of this interview featured in Waitrose Weekend in March 2021 (c) Waitrose