First off, and this is a couple days late, but we went purple for Canine Epilepsy Awareness Day on Wednesday the 26th. It was pretty cool to see all the support out there for our dogs, as well as all the people who have to live with this awful disease. Shadow also got to hang out with me at school and help my students with test anxiety since they had their 12 week exams. They all loved having her there, and she really enjoyed all the interaction

So since the birthday party on the first, we’ve had a couple of clusters. We kept a pretty close eye on her after the really nasty one on the 3rd, and Dr. Clarke upped the phenobarb to 64.8mg every 12 hours from 48.6mg every 12 hours. She was ok on that for a couple weeks, but then had a series of clusters on the 16th and 17th. Following those, Dr. Clarke had us go to every 8 hours instead of every 12, since the seizures were all happening right around morning med time. That timing led us to believe that the med levels were just dropping too low right around 0630, because that’s when she got a dose of everything. The meds all wind up getting spread through the day a little, it was just that one time a day where she got everything. So the new increase seems to be working, but we had a little hiccup this morning.

This morning when I came out do the shower, it looked like Shadow was stuck between the foot board and mattress, so I moved her back up towards Aaron. When he went to cuddle with her he noticed her pupils were huge and unreactive. She also had no blink reflex and wasn’t responding well to us. She drooled a little bit, and by that point we were pretty sure it was a focal seizure. We got her off the bed and she chased her tail a little bit and got super wobbly. She’d seem to come out of it for a couple minutes and then go right into another one. This went on for 15-20 minutes, and I wound up giving her a double dose of phenobarb and Levetiracetam. That seemed to work thankfully, and she hasn’t had any seizures since. Hopefully this was the last one for a while, but now we know more of the really subtle things to watch for. We are puppy sitting tomorrow for a couple of her doggy friends, I hope she does ok with them.

The last time we refilled the phenobarb, we decided to grab a refill of the Levetiracetam as well, just to save a trip to Costco in the future. We noticed when we got home that the Levetiracetam pills looked different this time, and sure enough they’re from a different manufacturer. I’ve heard in the past from other folks with epi dogs who had some problems when switching manufacturers, so that alone made me nervous. Now, in the past couple days, our canine epilepsy list serve has been blowing up with folks who are having problems with generic zonisimide. Turns out that something like 40% of generic meds are made in India, and recently they’ve come under scrutiny by the FDA for having unreliable meds and a plethora of other manufacturing issues that violate FDA standards. I called up Costco this afternoon, and I have to say I was very impressed with their pharmacists. The gentleman I talked to explained that they were no longer able to get the old Levetiracetam, which was from a company called Boca Pharmaceuticals whose meds are in fact made in India. They currently have the meds coming from Solco Healthcare, which despite being a US based company has their drugs made in China. I’m not real thrilled about either prospect, but we had 6 months with no seizures with the Boca drugs. I need to go digging, but I’m wondering if Boca isn’t one of the Indian manufacturers who has been banned by the FDA. The pharmacist at Costco was able to find 240 pills in stock though, and he has had them set aside for us. What’s there will last 2 months, so hopefully that will give us enough time to find a viable solution. I really don’t like the idea of meds made in China after all the problems we’ve been seeing with other Chinese made products. I’m going to spend some time researching how cheap I can get the name brand stuff, but unfortunately I do know it’s really expensive. I just want to give Shadow the best chance possible, but we do have to be realistic with the expenditures.

After all the joy and celebration of the weekend, reality snuck back up and bit me in the ass on Monday morning.  We had another snowstorm come through (is Spring ever going to come?), and I had a snow day from school.  I was pretty stoked, and planned on going back to bed for a while after feeding the dogs and giving Shadow her morning meds.  Shadow, and really I should say that asshole Hydrocephalus, had other plans.  Ghost and Shadow were begging to go play in the snow, and I let them go romp while I fed the cats.  As I opened the door to walk back up with them I realized that Shadow was going into a full on grand mal seizure.  It was definitely one of the more violent ones she’s had too, which scared the shit out of me.  It probably lasted about 45 seconds (I didn’t have my phone with the timer with me, was still in pajamas), and she seemed super disoriented when she finally stopped seizing.  Of course, the whole time she was seizing Ghost was trying to play and completely missed that something was wrong.  I was able to get her back into the house under her own power, but she was high stepping and hugging the walls when she came back in.  All indications were pointing at her gearing up to cluster, so I gave her the squirt of valium in her rear and gave her an extra dose of phenobarb and Keppra.  I don’t know if it was the valium kicking in or if this was an especially bad post ictal, but we couldn’t get her to settle down for about 45 minutes after the seizure.  At least she didn’t wind up clustering, but I was on the phone with the eVet to find out if they were even open in the snowstorm and to let them know we might be bringing her in.

Dr. Clarke is a saint, and had emailed me within about an hour and a half of the first phone call to the referral center with a new protocol for her.  So basically what we are looking at at this point is an increase in Phenobarbital and potentially an increase in the Omeprazole.  We’ve known she was sort of hanging out at the low end of the therapeutic range for the phenobarb, but none of us ere inclined to change it at the time since she was doing so well.  Guess it’s time to change the dosage…

It’s been entirely too long since I updated the blog, and I think a lot of that was a function of Shadow doing so well I didn’t want to jinx it.  I have a large update to make though, and I’m actually going to do it in parts because I want to keep the happy stuff untouched by the not so happy stuff we’ve experienced this week.

So after the addition of the Phenobarbital in August and the spay in September, Shadow had been doing amazingly well.  We’ve hit all kinds of milestones and experienced a bunch of “firsts” for her.  In late September she got to go on her first hike, and she adored it.  She did super well too.  We’ve now had several dog park trips, and she’s a hoot to watch at the park.  She mostly follows Ghost around like a true little sibling.  We can just imagine her saying “hey guys, wait for me!” as she tries to keep up with a pack of older dogs 😛  She’s also come to school with me several times to help reduce my students’ anxiety on test days.  She loves hanging out around with the mids, she’s such a little social butterfly.

So amongst all the milestones and whatnot, we hit one this past weekend that we were afraid we’d never see.  Shadow turned one on March 1st, and we threw one hell of a doggy birthday party.  Yes, I threw a birthday party for my dog.  Feel free to judge, I don’t care 😉  We had a crazy group of dogs and people, including several of Shadow’s litter mates, her mom, her foster mom who is the reason she is alive, and several of the vets and vet techs who have worked so hard to keep her healthy over the past several months.  She even had a little friend come down from New York City who also turned one on the first.  It was a lot of fun, and Shadow loved all the goodies she was spoiled with.  Our house is now a sea of stuffed toys in all different states of evisceration 😛