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.