At around 3AM Friday morning, my human woke up and I was on the bed with her. I chattered my teeth a few times, and when I went to stand up, I was VERY wobbly. Now you need to understand that with the medications I am on, one of the side effects IS wobbly behavior - and a weak rear end. Not weak enough to keep me from counter surfing, mind you, but I still have an interesting gait pattern at times. But that night I appeared extra wobbly. I did NOT have a grand mal seizure, which was good, but my behavior was odd. My human wondered if I was having a partial seizure. And if that wasn't stressful enough, I went and jumped off the bed in my wobbly state, before she could grab me. I sat down hard on the floor and looked at my human. I shook myself off and went to lie down - and I went back to sleep. But the BAD part was the next morning.
My human got up - and yours truly could NOT use one of his back legs. I mean I was a three legged dog. I held my leg up and would NOT bear weight on it. My human just about died. We went outside and let's just say that peeing and especially pooping were interesting on three legs. My human carried me back into the house.
Of course the first thing she did was contact one of her most intimate, and knowledgeable friends. Google. The first thing she searched for was ACL tear. The symptoms include an inability to bear weight on a rear leg. And a tear can happen by doing something like landing poorly after a jump. Great. And of course, she read about all the options for surgery. This is before 5:30 AM, I might add. And she was doubly panicking because she had to go to work.
All day long, she kept watching me with Big Brother. Actually, it was pretty boring, because I slept most of the day. Around mid-day she saw me walking around and I appeared to be weight bearing again.
By the time my human got home from work, you would NEVER have thought I had a problem that morning. I went outside, on a leash of course, and I trotted along with no hint of a limp. None. Zero.
So. Did I have a seizure? Hard to say. If it was one, it definitely wasn't a bad one. Could it have been a medication side effect? Possibly.
Now a GOOD bit of news. Because I haven't had a BIG seizure in so many days, we are reducing one of my medications. This is actually VERY good news - because that particular drug is hard on my liver.
My human is becoming more and more informed about canine epilepsy. The problem with the condition is that there is no "one size fits all" when it comes to treatment. What works for one dog may not work at ALL for another dog. And finding the right combination of medications is very much trial and error.
So given that I didn't have a BAD seizure, we'll continue the count - and hope that yesterday's weird behavior was just a glitch. Mind you....MAYBE I was acting weird because I got into the garbage can in the laundry room...and ate a fistful of dryer lint. Yup - I did it. Although most of it DID reappear when I was doing my three legged poop routine...And not to worry - we don't use dryer sheets so there were no toxic chemicals. I just ate fuzz. Plain old fuzzy fuzz. Yum.
Never, ever a dull moment in THIS house....
Have a good one. Peace and paws up!
Seizure-free days: 29
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