My puppy is coming home today.
Bragi is coming home from the hospital today. My beautiful 2-and-a-half year old 100% mutt puppy had four grand mal seizures in a 14-hour period the day before yesterday. He’d had one seizure a week and a half before those. It was also a classic grand mal seizure, including loss of bladder control, falling down, and rhythmic, violent twitches. He appeared to be ‘paddling’, since that’s the way his body is constructed. In a human, there’s a great deal more range of motion, and the twitches take many more forms. Of course, we took him to our veterinarian, who examined him and drew blood for testing. The blood test showed nothing unusual; no elevated liver enzymes to indicate he’d eaten something poisonous to him, and no elevated white blood cell count to indicate infection. The bloodwork essentially ruled out environmental toxins. Okay. So we don’t keep slug bait around, we knew that. But what WAS it? No way to tell, we just had to watch and wait.
So we did. He wasn’t out of our sight for a week and a half. At about 11am the day before yesterday, he was sleeping by the stairs, and had another seizure. I held him through it, and steadied him during his ‘post-ictal’ phase (that’s the short period of disorientation and imbalance that occurs immediately after a grand mal seizure.) As soon as he recovered his balance, he went outside and decorated the lawn with a largish pile of fecal matter. No worries; I have a poop-scoop. It took him a little over half an hour to appear normal again. I called the vet, who referred me to a VCA animal hospital in Lynnwood for further tests and perhaps an MRI scan. (If you have a four-legged family member with problems that can’t be fixed with a belly rub or a special treat, I highly recommend this place. It’s cleaner and better-run than most human hospitals I’ve been in, and they’ve got an in-house lab as well as the machinery necessary for things like an MRI.) I wrote down the information our local vet gave me, cleaned the carpets, and we settled down to wait for my husband to get home. At about 7:30, I was at my computer and Bragi was sleeping right behind my chair, when he had another seizure. Same as the last ones, but only lasting around 30-45 seconds rather than a minute or so. My husband got home shortly after that, and we called the VCA hospital, expecting to get an answering machine. We didn’t. That place is staffed 24 hours. We told them what had happened, and they asked us if we’d like to bring him in that night. We weren’t sure, since he’d lived his whole life without a seizure, why would he suddenly start having them? Then he had another. We called them back and asked for an address. He had another seizure after we got there, but they were able to stop it with valium. We spent a couple of hours waiting around while he was examined and had blood drawn for more extensive tests.
To make a long story much shorter and less boring, he had an MRI last night, and had spinal fluid drawn. The MRI looked normal; this rules out most intra-cranial problems, like lesions, tumors, cysts, excess water, and most infections that involve inflammation and swelling. The spinal fluid test will possibly rule out microbial infections like Meningitis. The blood tests could possibly rule out things like liver and kidney malfunction.
If all those things are ruled out, we’re left with this: Idiopathic Epilepsy. ‘Idiopathic’ means they don’t know what causes the seizures.
I’m not satisfied with this. I accept that we will have to treat the symptoms of something we can’t identify, most likely his whole life. I can’t accept that there isn’t a way to find out what causes seizures in an animal of any species, when none of the usual suspects (inflammation, infection, toxins, etc.) are at fault.
All I know so far is that seizures are typified by an extreme amount of uncontrolled activity in an animal’s forebrain, whether the animal be human, canine, or what have you. My investigation is going to have to start there. I'm just glad to finally be getting him back, because it's very, very difficult to sleep without a snoring puppy on the bed.