As good as things were looking last week, this week unfortunately sucked.  We upped the Keppra to 750 mg last week, and we’d been seizure free since then.  She went for a walk with Ghost on Saturday and was totally fine, and then she rocked out her CGC class on Sunday evening.  And then Monday came…

I dropped her off at daycare and told them that she’d had a really good weekend and that she could do a little bit of quiet group play.  I went back to pick her up around 4:00 and they said she’d had a small seizure around 10:30 but seemed ok.  Well, she came out walking kind of funny, and they asked if she was a wall hugger.  Right then it was pretty evident she was going into another seizure.  This was a little different, as she was somewhat responsive for a lot of it.  She was very drooly, and was really dazed afterwards.  I found out then that she’d had yet another small one about an hour before I got there.  I picked up the phone and called the neurologist right then, and they said to go ahead and go on home but watch her, and if she had another seizure to bring her right away to the ER.  Well, we got *maybe* a mile up the road from daycare before she started seizing again.  I pulled a U turn as soon as it was safe, and beat feet to the ER.  They took her back to stabilize her, and I talked to the doctor on call as well as our neurologist.  He wasn’t happy with the lack of control of the seizures, and so we talked at length about her best options and decided in the end that phenobarbital is the best course of action at this point.  So they gave her the loading dose of the phenobarb IV, as well as some valium to sedate her and break the seizure cluster.  I was there taking care of everything for a couple hours, and then I was able to go home.  I was beyond drained by the time I got home, and worried sick about her.

I kept the consult appointment Tuesday morning with the general surgeon to talk about her spay, but we obviously decided that Wednesday was not a good day to do it.  He said it should be pretty simple procedure and outlined the things he plans on doing to keep her brain protected.  I feel pretty confident, but with it being at the specialist and having all the extra precautions it’s going to be damn expensive.  We all agree that it needs to be done, and Dr. Clarke (neuro) said he’s found some truth to the old wives tale that unaltered females have a harder time with seizure control.  I’m aware that she might not be with us much longer, but I still want to get it done since it’s one less thing to worry about.

I was able to bring her home Thursday afternoon after work, and she hadn’t had a seizure since arriving at the ER.  I was pleased with that, but it was startling how affected she was by all the drugs.  She’s been super wobbly all week, and incredibly derpy.  She’s still our sweet little girl, but definitely out of it.  I’ve definitely seen some improvement over the last couple days in that regard, but she did have a small seizure after she got home on Tuesday, and then what I believe was a petit mal yesterday after we got home from work and daycare.  So far she’s been good today, so I hope the phenobarb levels are coming up and helping to control things.  We have a follow up with Dr. Clarke on Wednesday, and if she’s done well we’re going to revisit the spay and hopefully get that done by the end of the week.  I’m going to jump on the first window she gives us to get it done safely.

So, it’s been one hell of a long week, and I’m glad it’s essentially over.  Now I can go chill out, get some work graded for my classes, and do my reading for biology in the morning.  Then, Colorado and summiting Mount Elbert

So it’s been a couple weeks since I posted, mostly because I’ve been crazy busy with work.  Powered Flight was insane, and then classes started up this week which has been a different kind of crazy.

Anyway, we’ve pretty much settled into a routine with Shadow at this point.  If we don’t let her play hard outside with Ghost, she generally doesn’t have seizures.  If we let her, then she does.  So most of the time we don’t let her, because I want to keep the seizures to a minimum.  She’s doing tremendously well overall, basically being a normal, bratty, ornery Husky puppy.  She is still kind of mellow, but definitely has a lot more spunk.  She started a Canine Good Citizen class this past week as well, and definitely wasn’t the worst dog in the class.  She made some huge improvements over the class period, and the best part was she didn’t have a seizure.  We had taken her to a dog park on Saturday, and she did have one there.  She did really well otherwise, and got completely doused in mud.  I really think she’s kind of a one and done kind of dog with those seizures.

We saw Dr. Clarke again today for a brief check up, and he’s given the ok for her to get spayed.  So, we have an appointment for a consult with one of the specialty surgeons at the Chesapeake Veterinary Center next Tuesday.  We may or may not proceed with the spay the following day, or we may wait until we get back from Colorado the following week.  That one depends on what the surgeon thinks about spaying her and then having her boarded 2 days later.  Overall though, Dr. Clarke is very pleased with her progress, but he did bump up the Keppra to 750 mg because she’s grown quite a bit since this all started.  Fatty McFatFat weighed 49 lbs this morning, and is almost as tall as Ghost now.  Someone is in a growth spurt…

Well, we’ve gone about 51 hours now without a seizure.  I’m testing the hypothesis that these are triggered by activity, and the past two days seem to confirm this.  I have not allowed Ghost and Shadow in the back yard together since Tuesday evening, because that seems to be the trigger.  They’ve all pretty much happened outside or immediately after coming in after playing hard.  She seems to be fine just wrestling in the house and running around inside, but zoomies outside seem to trigger another seizure.  I am going to run a test tomorrow and allow the two of them to run around outside and see what happens.  If we have a seizure, I’m going to back off and rest her again for a couple days, and then give her a squirt of Rescue Remedy before allowing her to run around outside again.  I really want to find a way to let her be active outside while minimizing the seizure risk.  Hell, I’d love to be able to take her on a walk with Ghost right now.

I also want to share her current treatment protocol, so that other people can see what I’m doing and so that I have a record of what variables I change when I decide to tweak something.  I’m taking a very scientific approach to this, and my aim is to only change one thing at a time (though I changed a few at once this week).

Medication Routine:

0700 – 500 mg Keppra (regular release), 10 mg Prilosec, 4 Di Tan Tang tea pills (adding 0.5 g Peanut Hydrocephalus powder next Tuesday)

1500 – 500 mg Keppra

1900 – 10 mg Prilosec, 4 Di Tan Tang tea pills, 600 mg Fish Oil, 0.5 g Peanut Hydrocephalus Powder

2300 – 500 mg Keppra

We are also doing some diet modification.  She eats Nutrisca Salmon and Chickpea formula, and I have checked the ingredients to make sure none of the foods we are supposed to avoid are in there.  The ones for her to avoid are pork, dairy, eggs, bananas, and sugar.  Foods that will help flush fluid and strengthen her kidney and spleen function include blueberries, celery, beef, chicken, fish, quinoa, strawberries, raspberries, almonds, and several others.  I’ve essentially limited all of the “bad” foods from her diet, and added in a rotation of the good stuff.  Mostly right now I’m taking a handful of blueberries, raspberries, and/or strawberries and adding them to her kibble, and I give her the meds stuffed into all natural beef hotdogs.

Finally, we have now done two acupuncture sessions and will be going in fairly regularly for the time being.  After my little activity experiment is concluded, I will discuss the results with both the neurologist and the holistic vet, and see what they suggest to help her be a little more active.  I’m really hoping the Rescue Remedy works, but I may explore the addition of Valerian as well.  Keep stopping by for updates as we figure out what works best for her.

So, we’re back to where we were a week ago.  She started back with the daily seizures on Saturday morning during the play date, and we’ve had one per day since then.  Sunday’s was later at night, and then today and yesterday they were right around dinner time, so right in the middle of the dose cycle.  I’m about 98% sure it’s activity related, because every single one she’s had since starting the medication has been while she was active.  It makes sense, activity gets the blood pressure up, which in turn raises cranial pressure if I’m not mistaken, so increase in pressure equals seizure.  So do we keep her quiet or do we let her be a puppy and realize we’re going to have seizures?  Right now she’s harassing the cats and wrestling with Ghost.  It makes the house feel normal, but I still worry that she’s going to go into one at any second.

I think we might have avoided one last night, but I need to do some more experiments.  We’ve noticed that most of the time when she has one, she goes into it from zoomies.  We now call it seizure zoomies.  Well, she got zoomies last night and looked rather frantic, so I called her out of it and gave her a little squirt of Rescue Remedy and she was fine.  I’m not sure if it actually did anything or if it was purely coincidental, but I’m going to be testing some stuff with her over the next few days.  I’m going to limit the activity with Ghost for 2 days and see how she does, if she’s doing well then I’m going to introduce activity back in.  We shall see.  Today’s may have been exacerbated too, she was ripping around the yard with Ghost and she fell in the pool.  It was actually kind of funny, she came flying around from the side yard, realized she was too close to the pool and tried to put on the brakes, but she still skidded across the concrete and right on in.  I fished her out, but about 2 minutes later we had seizure zoomies.

We had another acupuncture session today as well, and thankfully she did not manage to eat any needles this time 😛  We distracted her with a frozen jar of baby food, and it worked like a champ.  She was more than happy to sit there licking the frozen chicken in chicken gravy while she got turned into a canine pin cushion.  She also started a new supplement today, called Peanut Hydrocephalus Powder.  I hope this stuff works, I really want these to stop.  She still pops right back up like nothing happened, but I’m so afraid she’s doing damage every time she has another one.  I really need these to stop, if the holistic stuff and inactivity don’t do anything, I’m going to go ahead and let the neurologist add in the zonisamide.

On a lighter note, we had a milestone of sorts today at work.  We’ve been working on “other paw” with her to give us her left paw, and she finally got it today.  I was so excited I was giddy, it was actually sort of pathetic.  But for us, it was a coveted moment of normalcy.  I even texted Aaron about it while bragging to everyone at work 😛

On a completely unrelated note, I love how I can bang out 500 words here like it’s nothing, but a 500 word essay is pure torture 😛

We’ve had a pretty good week with Shadow since switching back to the 8 hour Keppra and beginning the holistic treatment.  Our mellow little girl has definitely come out of her shell and has started to act like the bratty, ornery, into everything Husky puppy that she is.  It’s actually really funny, though the cats don’t really think so.  She’s started chasing them a bit more, so they kind of hate us right now.

Our perspective on life in general has definitely changed a lot over the past 2 weeks.  We see the little things that everyone else takes for granted with their “normal” dogs, and we cheer for her.  She caught a tennis ball for the first time last night, and it was a huge deal.  She counter surfed the other day, and I definitely did a little dance before scolding her to get down.  She’s now figured out that if she grabs something she’s not supposed to have and then runs, that it’s a really fun game.  Some of these things we wanted to strangle Ghost for 2 years ago, and now we’re thrilled that we get to deal with it again.

She’s been doing so well that we decided to have a play date and see how she did.  So we invited Ghost’s friend Khuno over to play, and for the most part things have been great.  We decided to let the big kids go run off some steam in the back yard before letting Shadow out, and unfortunately shortly after Shadow went out to join them she had a small seizure.  It only lasted about 30 seconds and mostly involved her head twitching, and she popped up and resumed playing like nothing ever happened.  We talked about bringing her in, but decided to let her keep playing and see how she did.  Khuno is still over (the guys are out tinkering with cars while the dogs play), and so far she’s been totally fine.  She’s been going and resting when she needs, but also running around and giving the big dogs a run for their money.  So what do we do?  It appears as though activity/stress are her triggers.  She’s a Husky, she wants to be rambunctious and romp around with Ghost.  We want to take her on walks and hikes, but we don’t want to keep inducing seizures if activity really is her trigger.  We want to let her be as normal as possible.  I have a vial of Rescue Remedy, I think I’m going to mix that with some all natural vanilla ice cream and give her that before a walk or something this week and see how she does.  If it works, I will probably try pushing the envelope a little bit so we can figure out what her limits really are.  It just sucks feeling like every time we think we’re getting somewhere, we have another little setback.  We cheer for her little victories, but are crushed every time she has another seizure.  Is shunting the answer?  I don’t know.  I don’t want to put her through that, but if that’s what she needs then we’ll make it happen.

First off, the needle made it’s way through and reemerged into the world about 48 hours after she ate it 😉

Secondly, who is this maniac Husky puppy and what has she done with my mellow little girl?  Seriously, we have a crazy, ornery little Husky puppy running around the house.  I’m not going to lie, I cheered a little when Shadow grabbed one of Aaron’s socks and bolted across the house with it.  It was such a normal puppy thing to do, but something she’s never done before.  She also got poop zoomies for the first time ever yesterday.  I was annoyed because I had to chase her down to pick through the poop, but silently cheering because of the normalness of it.  For the uninitiated reading this, poop zoomies are where they run around the yard really fast and then squat and poop.  I think the cats are pissed off, she’s suddenly chasing and harassing them after never doing that before.  They’ll live…