Home today

I’m not going to work today.  Just as we were leaving, Roxy had either four seizures, one on top of the next, or one really long one.  I reached for the door to let them in like normal, and I told Riley to leave her alone, ’cause she was just sitting there, kind of dopey, and he looked like he was trying to get her to play with him.  I opened the door to pull him away and I noticed that she was have a very mild seizure.  Ten seconds later, she shook herself as if everything was okay and then fell to the floor (of the deck) and started convulsing like she meant it.  Weird sounds, difficulty breathing – it was one of her more violent seizures.  She got up pretty quickly from that and dashed/stumbled off the deck, getting stuck in the railing on the way down the stairs, yelping until she hit the ground.  Then she headed for the gate on the garage side, where she fell to the ground again for more convulsions.  This is where I can’t tell if she had two or more separate seizures or if it was all part of the same thing.  She relaxed for a little bit and then started to convulse again.  For the next few minutes (maybe – I’m a bad judge of time on a normal day, and these things seem to last forever), she lay on her side in the dirt with her legs moving like she was running, scrabbling her paws sideways in the mud (and flinging bits of mud on me as I stood there).  She kept getting her nose stuck between the slats in the gate, so I’d drag her out of that trap, only to have her shove her nose up against a fence slat so she started having trouble breathing.  And through all of this she was convulsing.  It was terrible.  In the (relative) quiet before the last one started, I told John I wanted to take her to the vet if she convulsed again, so when it began again (or continued – whatever), John put Riley in his crate and spread the blankets over the backseat of the car.

When she stopped this last time, she didn’t try to get up immediately.  She just stayed down, on her side, breathing.  It started to look like the aftermath of a normal seizure, and we started to calm down.  I did, anyway.  I think John stayed calmer than me from the start.  He kept an eye on her while I got the phone to call the vet.  The result of that call is that Roxy shouldn’t be left alone today.  Either one of us could stay home and watch her or we could leave her at the vet.  Since the vet didn’t need to see her immediately (the seizures stopped and things seemed to be going back to normal), we decided that I would stay home today.  I made an appointment to bring her in for an exam and bloodwork tomorrow night after work.  Her dosage might need to be tweaked a bit.  It’s only been about three weeks since her last seizure.

Anyway, that’s why I’m home today.  Roxy is finally back to her normal self (it took her almost an hour to shake this off this morning – usually it’s only 20-30 minutes), although she’s being a little clingy.  Poor Riley couldn’t figure out what was going on.