It is official. Max has epilepsy. As of now, he has had four seizures in less than 24 hours. His first one was at 9:45 last night. It was the worst one in terms of duration. Between the start of his shaking and him being able to stand and walk around it was about seven minutes. This one happened in his kennel when we were getting ready for bed.
I moved the dogs into the living room so Max would have more room to walk around. He gets really restless and disoriented after one of his seizures, and needs to walk around and explore, but also doesn't like to be very far away from one of us. So after every lap around the room, he would try to climb into my lap. Or lay on top of me. He finally settled down about 11:30pm.
The second seizure happened at about 12:35 am. We were all in a dead sleep. Max was laying at the end of the sofa and he fell off onto the floor, shaking. This one was shorter than the first one, but his restless roaming lasted a lot longer. He finally fell asleep somewhere around 3:30. I laid down but was afraid to fall asleep, because I was worried he would have another one. I finally did, sometime after 4:30am.
The third seizure happened at 1:20 pm while he was napping and lasted about a minute and he had a couple of minutes recovery. Then he was fine. Our vet called in a prescription of phenobarbitol, and I gave him his first dose a little before 2pm. He did ok until about 5:30 when he had his fourth seizure of the day. It was short like the one at 1:20.
I called the vet and asked how long it would take for his meds to work, and was told a couple of weeks, which I thought was kind of ridiculous. There is no way I can function on about 2 hours of sleep a night for two weeks. They said we could give him another dose of the meds right away, and if he starts having a series of seizures right after each other to take him to an emergency vet and get him set up on an IV to get the meds in his bloodstream faster.
After the last two seizures, Max threw up. The vet said this was normal. I was grateful he was doing something normal.
Hopefully, we are through with seizures today, but I am not holding my breath. I just want some sleep tonight. We have decided to keep the dogs in the living room at night until we can get Max's situation stabilized.
Everyone else is doing ok, but Katy gets very upset every time Max has a seizure and ends up coughing and throwing up and snapping at Max to stop it. It looks like it is going to be a learning curve for all of us.
