For those who may be wondering, I wanted to give you the latest on our 11 year old Golden Retriever, Annie.

If you read yesterday’s post, you know that Annie had a seizure the day before and we took her to an emergency clinic.

Yesterday afternoon, Annie had another seizure. This is the first time I was there from beginning to end. Have you ever seen a dog (or anyone) have a seizure? It’s heartbreaking because you’re helpless. You just have to wait it out.

Yesterday was one of those great Sundays when all I had to do was read the paper, catch up on email and wait for the Sunday night HBO shows to come on (have you been watching The Pacific and Treme? Terrific).

Annie had been snoozing peacefully most of the day. I’d walk by her, rub her belly, pat her face, nuzzle my face against her snout and continue on.

I was at my computer when I heard my wife Carol calling (shades of Annie’s first seizure). I knew by Carol’s voice that she wasn’t going to tell me we’d won the lottery.

Annie was on her side, her legs flailing, her mouth open and small gobs of spittle oozing from between her jaws. I sat beside her and stroked her, praying for it to end. I learned later that, during a seizure, the dog is oblivious to everything, so the stroking was more to calm me than her (I also learned never to put your hands near a seizing dog’s mouth. The dog may be involuntarily snapping its jaws and you could get bitten. Annie didn’t do this.).

I started my digital watch to see how long the seizure was lasting, then forgot to look once the seizure ended. It seemed like 10 minutes and was probably closer to 3.

Afterwards, Annie behaved as she did after the seizure Saturday night. You would have thought she drank a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. For one hour (one hour!) we followed her meanderings around the house and kept her from banging into walls and furniture. I recalled pictures of epileptic children wearing football helmets. I now have first hand knowledge of why.

Suddenly, I could see by Annie’s good eye (her right eye has Horner’s disease which causes her eyelid to droop to the point where she can’t see out of it) that she was back among us. You know how you’ll hear descriptions of a light going on when people come out of a coma? Well, that’s what I saw in Annie’s left eye. I could literally see in her eye that she was coming back to full consciousness.

We gave her the 90 mgs of Phenobarbital that the vet at the emergency clinic had told us to give her. Phenobarbital is also given to humans for epilepsy. We called to leave a message with our regular vet to make an appointment as early as we could on Monday. We received a call back (they take calls 24 hours even though they’re not open on the weekends) and got an appointment for 7:40 this morning.

 Annie drank and drank and drank water and spent the next two hours (two hours!) meandering on her own without bumping into anything. We called the emergency clinic and they told us there was really nothing to do but watch her. The danger is that she would have a seizure, come out of it and seizure again. Fortunately, that didn’t happen. However, Annie was still meandering when we went to bed (Carol and I told each other only half jokingly that we should sleep in shifts which would have been better than what did happen. We both stayed up most of the night). 

Annie did not have a seizure during the night. In the morning, I gave her another 90 mgs of Phenobarbital as the vet had prescribed. To my amazement, when I put food in her bowl, she ate it. For the last two weeks, the only way she would eat was if we fed her out of our hand and she wouldn’t always eat even then.

When I took her on a walk, I’m not kidding, she seemed to walk faster than she had been walking before the seizures.

When we got to the vet this morning, he told us that Phenobarbital takes several weeks to build up to a therapeutic dosage, so it’s unlikely the drug had anything to do with Annie’s renewed vigor. I didn’t take the drug but I can tell you that my vigor is really good right now seeing Annie so “perky.”

So what’s next? Annie’s blood work is good, her temperature and white blood count are normal. The vet drew blood to check on Valley Fever (a mysterious disease I still don’t understand even after living for 26 years in Phoenix) and deer ticks (we spend part of the summer in Washington State). We’ll get those results back in 2 days.

If all that’s negative, then we have to decide whether or not to do an MRI because the only possibility left is neurological damage. Besides the fact that it can cost as much as $2,000.00 (there goes the trip to Paris. Maybe Paris, Texas), what would we do if a tumor or some equally horrible thing were found? Annie is 11. We won’t put her through surgery.

If you’re interested, I got good information about seizures and treatments at http://www.canine-epilepsy.net/basics/basics_main.html. It’s long and I skipped some parts, but I did learn that Phenobarbital can cause liver damage over time so Annie will need to have regular blood tests (the article also suggested that liver damage is treatable).

No great lesson to be imparted today except the tried and true: Let’s love each other while we can. Nothing lasts forever.

Thanks for your time and I’d love to read your comments.

For the last six months, our Golden Retriever, Annie, has been getting increasingly lethargic. She sleeps more than ever. She walks slower than ever. She has Horner’s disease which has caused her eye to droop to the point where she can no longer see out of her right eye. She use to sleep in the bedroom with my wife and me and she no longer does so. She won’t eat out of her bowl. We have to put the food in our hands and offer it to her. She didn’t eat at all several days last week. At her last exam, we discovered that her weight had dropped by 15 pounds since January.

We put her on thyroid medication thinking that would perk her up and it did. But while she no longer slept all day long, she would spend many minutes pacing in circles around the living room of our house, lie down for a time and then start pacing again.

We took her to a vet last week and he thinks there may be a neurological issue. He told us to take her off the thyroid medication. Next week, we may have an MRI done to see if we can learn what’s going on although, at 11 years old, we wouldn’t put her through surgery. Perhaps there’s medication she can take.

In the meantime, last night at 10 PM, as we were just falling off to sleep, Annie had a seizure. We didn’t know it was a seizure until the vet at the 24-hour clinic we took her to, told us that’s what it was. We thought she was having a nightmare.

My wife Carol heard thumping in the living room and there was Annie, desperately trying to get up from the tile floor. She kept falling back down. We’d help her up and she’d fall back down.

As we were helping her up, she began walking around the room like a drunk, banging into the walls and furniture.

By the time we got to the clinic 15 minutes away, the seizure was over and Annie was able to walk into the clinic (in fact, the seizure ended just about the time we lifted Annie into the car for the ride to the clinic).

At the clinic, the vet sedated her, drew blood, did a chest X-ray and observed her. All the tests were negative. We’re left with the possibility that her regular vet was right in suspecting neurological damage. We have an appointment with that vet in two days.

Thanks for sticking with this lengthy litany of woes because I have a point I want to make. Once again, Annie has taught me something. She has taught me that, indeed, suffering is optional.

Unlike my wife and me, Annie doesn’t appear to be suffering over any of this. The emergency vet and our regular vet don’t think she’s in pain. As I write this, she is sleeping soundly, apparently unconcerned that another seizure might occur. We took her on a long walk this morning and she was her usual sniffing, peeing, pooping self.

Perhaps she is suffering. She can’t tell me. All I know for sure is that I am. And I’m suffering not because of what’s here in the present. Suffering is rarely in the present.

No, I’m suffering because, suddenly, I’m living into a possible future that won’t include Annie and I’ve been rehearsing what that future may be like. Instead of fully loving Annie now, as she is, my life is tinged with the sadness of that possible future. Doing so, keeps me from enjoying her fully right here and right now. And I’m committed to enjoying her fully because I love her fully.

It made me think of all the other moments I don’t enjoy fully because of thoughts about the future. I was having coffee with a friend and, as we were talking, my mind drifted to some work I had to complete. I ran into a neighbor as I was walking Annie and, as we were conversing, I was thinking about how I had to get home to watch some television show. I was on the phone with my sister and I watched the clock to calculate when it would be okay to end the conversation. As I type this, my mind strays to the to do list on the desk.

There’s a man at my gym that I see every morning. He’s about 70 and always has a smile on his face. One day, he told me he has severe asthma and diabetes that requires him to carefully monitor everything he eats. Yet there he is every morning with a smile on his face and a “HI, how are you?” for everyone.

I asked him how he maintains his positive attitude and he told me that he wakes every morning and repeats several times, “I’m happy, I’m healthy, I’m healing.”

I’ve started doing that. I wonder what Annie’s version of that mantra is. She is my role model. She never seems to choose suffering. I’m committed to doing the same.

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