Apparently, He's Not So Lucky

What a crazy last few days! Our dog, Lucky, started having seizures Saturday night. Mom, Jeff, Katy, Logan, Leah, and I had all been up watching a movie and came back downstairs about midnight. Lucky had been outside, and when I went to bring him in, I realized that he had gotten out of an open gate. We found him in front of the house and brought him inside for bed.

Maybe 30 minutes later, he was lying on the floor in our bathroom, and I heard him making noise banging up next to the cabinets. I thought he was chasing a fly at first, but as the racket got worse our curiosity made us flip on the lights to see what was going on. By that time, Lucky was on the floor, rigid, and shaking; he was in the middle of his first seizure.

We didn't know what to do, but he stopped on his own after a couple of minutes. The next 20 minutes or so he spent walking in a circle in my bedroom, but it was like he didn't know where he was and couldn't see right because he kept running into stuff. Finally, he went to sleep and seemed fine the next morning. We all wondered if he had been dehydrated or had maybe gotten into something poisonous when he got out of the yard.

Nothing else happened during the day on Sunday, though, so we figured things were fine. That night, he slept in Abbie's room, and when we got up Monday morning there was dog poo all over her room. We just thought that was a little strange because he hasn't messed in the house in a very long time, and Lucky was his same old self at the time. Looking back, we believe that he seized during the night, lost control of himself, and walked through his mess during his disoriented pacing routine.

Later in the day, just after lunch actually, Lucky had another seizure. Leah called the vet and took him in for a look. They drew some blood, said they'd call with results, and sent him home. Silly us, we let him sleep in Abbie's room again with the same results as Sunday night: a huge mess to clean Tuesday morning. The only detail that was different was that Lucky was not at all himself. He wouldn't let any of us near him.

In the next couple of hours, while waiting for the vet to open, he seized one more time and continued to be very disoriented and shy of everyone. When we finally got the vet on the phone, they said that the blood work came back and that they could tell he had been having seizures. Love that wealth of information. Anyway, they prescribed Phenobarbital twice a day to get the seizures under control, and they said that we probably won't ever know what's causing the seizures.

Leah went and picked up the medicine and gave him his first dose yesterday morning. After that first dose, he had at least 4 more minor seizures, and he spent the rest of the day looking like he was stoned. He drooled uncontrollably and obviously had no idea where he was or who we were. By the time I got home it was obvious that something else needed to be done, so Leah called the after hours number for the vet.

We got a call back from a different vet at the clinic; the vet that we will be seeing from now on. He told us that there are 10 different things that can cause seizures in dogs. They can test for 8 of them with a blood test and that we know it's not one of those 8. The 8 being things like poison, nutritional issues, illness, etc. The other two being a brain tumor or epilepsy. Epilepsy is the most likely cause when the first 8 are ruled out, and there is no real test for that. The best they can do is treat the seizures with the medication that we started yesterday. If the medication didn't work, though, then we could look into tumors. He said, though, that epilepsy will present between 1 and 2 years of age (Lucky is right between those two) while tumors don't generally present until they over 5 or 6 years.

We learned more about this condition in a 10 minute phone conversation than we had gotten out of two visits to the other vet. Needless to say, we'll be seeing him from now on, but we still had to deal with the fact that Lucky was continuing to seize. The vet told us to go ahead and give him more medication right then and then another dose a few hours later at bedtime.

What a challenge. If you've ever tried to get a dog to take a pill, I'm sure you know how tough that can be a challenge in itself. Imagine trying to do that with a dog that doesn't know who you are, isn't interested in eating anything (so disguising it in cheese or peanut butter doesn't do you any good), and may have a seizure at any minute. It took both of us both times.

As far as I know, Lucky was up all night long drooling all over himself and having minor seizures, but at some point the medicine apparently started working. This morning he's very lethargic, but not as skittish, not drooling, and he actually went outside to relieve himself. Hopefully, we can get these medication worked out correctly to allow him to have a normal life, but we do still have a lot more information to find out.

If you want to read a more technical explanation of seizures in dogs, there's a good page on labradornet, or you can just do a google search. There is a lot of information out there.

UPDATE - 12:06pm - I just talked with Leah, and Lucky's apparent improvement only lasted a few hours this morning. He had another seizure midmorning and he's been pacing and drooling again the past hour or two. Leah called the vet again and they said that it may take a week or so for the Phenobarbital to get into his system enough to really be effective. For now, they are going to give us another emergency medication to use to make them stop for today.

The next few weeks we are going to really have to keep a close eye on him. If we can control this with medication, give Lucky a good quality of life, and not have unreasonable expenses, then I am all on board. If we can't have all of those, we're going to have to make some tough decisions. It's not fair for Lucky if we can't give him a good quality of life, and I'm not interested in having another car payment size expense right now. I've just told Leah that we have to draw some boundaries now so we don't get nickel and dimed to death and end up spending a small fortune. We'll just have to see how the next few weeks go.

UPDATE - 3:30pm - After two doses of the emergency medicine, Lucky continued to seize (and accidentally bit Leah as she was trying to give him his second dose), and his temperature got critically high. 106 is a bad situtaion, and his rose to 110. Leah rushed him to the vet, and I left work to meet her there.

They packed him in ice and gave him Phenobarbital through an IV along with some Valium. His temperature came down, and the drugs knocked him out. At least for now, the seizures have stopped. We're going to have to move him to an overnight clinic in an hour or so, and I'll be interested to see how they report on his progress through the night. If it really is just a matter of getting enough of the drugs in his system, then they say he should be fine in another day or so. If it's something else (something worse), then I'm not sure that we are in a position to continue to down this road much longer.