Josie and the Beeps

Years ago, there was a terrible thunderstorm in the middle of the night. Lightning struck a house on the street right next to ours, causing a huge boom. It freaked Josie out, who was laying on the bed. When it happened, it also made my oxygen concentrator beep due to the surge. All of it, combined, made her want to run for it. To where, I have no idea, but we tried to keep her on the bed with us. Knowing what I know now, that was probably not the best thing for us to do, but we had no idea.

Ever since then, she has been scared of thunderstorms, especially ones at night. I've worked with her a lot to try to calm her fear and redirect it. If possible, we play or go in the basement. And if she tries to hide under our bed, as I now think she was wanting to do that initial time, we usually don't block her. If that's where she feels safe, then we shouldn't try to stop that. That being said, my biggest fear with that (and still is) is that a storm might progress and get so bad that we actually NEED to go to the basement, and it will be hard or impossible to coax her out.

Anyways, lately I've noticed a new thing she's scared of: beeps.

I'm not quite sure where this came from except I can say the first time I ever noticed it was about 4-6 months ago when we had a beeping smoke detector in the basement. I actually asked my dad to come over and fix it around 11am, instead of waiting for Jarrod to come home, because it was bothering Josie so much.

So in this case, she shakes. You'd think she is shivering, but she's nervously shaking. Even up to an hour later, sometimes I still catch her having tiny little shakes.

This is on my mind again because last night, as I was demonstrating my new glucose meter to Jarrod, we later noticed she was sitting in a corner of the kitchen, shaking. It took me a second, but then I realized that it must have been the tiny beep that my meter makes when I turn it on. Wonderful... this thing I'm now supposed to use 4+ times a day is going to make her nervous.

I love Josie so dearly, but I gotta say this is the last thing I feel like tackling right now. I'm going to have to do some good research on training her out of this, because this is not going to be good if we let it go. Fortunately, it doesn't seem like our alarm system bothers her, and maybe because that's predictable. She knows this thing in the house beeps when we leave, and it beeps again after we open the door and are back home, which is almost always followed by the sound of the garage door. But even the other night I was watching Star Wars, and I noticed her ears move every time R2-D2 made his beeps and boops. Luckily she didn't start shaking, but she was definitely noticing it.

Le sigh... I can turn off the beep on my glucose meter, which I might do, but still. We really need to fix this problem before it gets any worse.