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…