Tag Archives: seizure

by

A Week of Friday the 13ths….

Last Wednesday, January 4, I took my little Furgii to get her semi-annual checkup.  She passed her physical examination, and all of her blood work and other bodily function samples came back negative.  This, of course, was simply awesome.

But then came this week.

On Sunday, the 8th, I came home from work to hear Furg making noises that were “snorty”, like she was having trouble breathing.  Someone came up with the description of a “reverse sneeze”, and it’s as good a description as any I could come up with for it.  She wasn’t doing it all the time, but fairly often.

She also tends to wake up in the night and move around a lot.  At one point that night, she had gotten up, resettled, and was shaking.  Shortly after that, she got off the bed and went to a corner of the room to lay down.  She has a dog bed in the bedroom, but that’s not where she chose to go.  She went to the other side of the room, to an area she doesn’t generally go.  That really freaked me out, because my Mother’s poodle died when I was growing up, and the dog had never been in the dining room unless he was passing through to another area of the house.  He never stayed in the dining room.  When the poodle died (of old age), he went to the dining room to do it, like he had pre-designated that area for that purpose and avoided it until the time came.  This is what I thought of when Furgii went to that corner.

I called out of work Monday, and took her to the vet.  After listening to her lungs, trachea, and nasal passages, the exam yielded nothing out of the ordinary.  I was told to give her some Benadryl for 3 days to see if it was an allergy causing this.  I had vacuumed up the apartment (which I admittedly hadn’t done in a bit through the holiday chaos period) in case it was from dust.  I also cleaned the tub in case there was some kind of mildew that wasn’t visible causing this(ditto).  By Wednesday, the 11th, she was dry heaving, but not doing the snort thing, and Thursday yielded an end to the hacking but instead a persistent dry, guttural cough was the symptom of the day.  We returned to the vet.

After all airways and lungs still showed nothing abnormal, it was theorized that it may just be Kennel Cough, which could go away on its own, but it could also be from some form of infection, so The Furg’s now on an antibiotic for 10 days.  One day seems to be making a huge difference.  There was some coughing this morning before I went to work, but almost nothing since coming home.  That, and her energy had returned; during the week, the usually always-ready-to-play Furgii was very subdued.  She would start to play on instinct and then quit, with her tail making curious poses rather than curled upward and over her back like normal.

But then the worst of it came.  I wrote in an earlier post of the seizures she experienced in my first 2 weeks with her but that the foster home had not seen, as well as the theories on what may have caused them.  Around 3:30, I looked from my computer to see her in the midst of another one.  I had weened her off the phenobarbital as of October 29th, and there was no recurrence of seizures or evidence of any such events happening in my absence.  But there she was, having the 3rd I’m aware of and first since those first 2 weeks a year and a half ago.

I took video of it on my phone, and got 4 minutes of footage before she returned to normal, and I started shooting about a minute after I’d noticed the seizure.  Thus it was at least 5 minutes long, her previous ones being 15-20 minutes each.  From the point I had recognized what was happening, she was definitely seeing her environment and could move her head (the previous 2 events, she was completely locked except for a Stevie Wonder-like swaying).  She tried to get up, and her left paw was locked initially before she moved a foot or so and laid down again.  That was when I started filming.  After the 5 minutes, it was over, and my Furgii was back, as if nothing had happened.

I had hoped that this was all behind her, and I hate having to put her back on that medicine.  It definitely changed who she is as a dog, I believe.  But I took my risk with her health by seeing if she could do without it, and I lost that gamble.  I’m so grateful she doesn’t seem to have paid for it long-term.

So, the whole week leading into Friday the 13th was bad enough, but today, Friday, was naturally the worst.

by

The Ballad of The Furg….

I find it hard to keep up with my blog.  Most days I suppose I don’t have much to say.  The holiday season doesn’t help, as it adds so much pressure and longer work hours for me.

So, what’s new….I finally gave the dog a much-needed bath today, which is one chore off of the mountain I’d been neglecting.  It kept getting put back because of all the rain; what’s the purpose of washing her when she’s going to get muddy?

While washing the dog isn’t necessarily fun (especially since I know she hates it), watching the after-show party always is.  Most dogs aren’t nuts about the bath, but they always seem to get some turbo-boost of energy afterwards, running all around the home and crashing into things.  Furgii’s a smaller dog (12 lbs.), so it’s even more amusing I’d think, than with a bigger dog since she’s small and flies all around with incredible agility.  I also love the sound of her feet pattering all over the carpets and the constant dry-off shake which she does so vigorously her back legs come off the floor.  She provided a lot of laughs today, and it’s only 10:45, having gotten up about three hours ago.

My Furg is a rescue, and all future pets will be as well.  She’s my first or second pet depending on how you count.  My “first” dog was Chance, and I only had him five weeks.  He had an illness that was too severe for me to manage on my own.  His disease was undiagnosed at the time.  I had even written a song for him, “Taking a Chance”, in anticipation of getting him.  The song is about, after what happened to my stepson and my marriage, that maybe it was him saving me rather than the other way around.  He is an amazing dog, and we had bonded in pretty much three days.  It was an incredible experience, but it wasn’t to be.  It was and still is heartbreaking.  Hence I got Furgii.

Now, The Furg was muuuuch slower to open up and bond.  She was okay here, and okay being with me, but I didn’t realize how many levels there were to her trust and comfort until they opened up one by one.  Chance seemed to know in a day that I loved him and would never hurt him.  He knew I was his new owner, and loved back almost instantaneously.  She was so slow to do the same.

I’ve had her almost a year and a half now.  Her story is that a young woman in North Carolina was at work and saw Furgii wandering across the parking lot.  She had a collar, but no tag or microchip.  The woman and her husband posted around to attract her owner to no avail.  They contacted a rescue, but the rescue was so booked they offered to pay for the bills if the couple would foster her.  Six months later (June 26, 2010), I adopted her.  It was a month after I had to give up Chance.

They didn’t know her name, so she was “Girl” for a bit, then “Sweet Pea”, and then “Peanut”.  It was as Peanut that I adopted her.  I wasn’t crazy about the name, and she’d only had it six months, so I changed it to Furgii, after the singer, Fergie, my celebrity crush.  I apologize if this joke offends you, but it was a joke that gave her the name.  I was deciding what I would call her, and thought, “If I name her Fergie, then I could say that Fergie’s my bitch, and I’d be telling the truth.”  Well the joke might be in poor taste and not very good, but the name stuck, although I altered the spelling.  The new spelling was inspired by Finnish hockey players with names like “Niiniimaa” and “Niitimakii”.  It took at least six months for her to get that she’s “Furgii”, but she definitely does now.

I often wonder how she ended up wandering around North Carolina in January 2010.  Did she escape?  Did some piece of shit owner just turn her loose to fend for herself?  The first thought is heart-wrenching, and the second one is maddening.  She is my blessing now, that’s all I do know.

I eventually wrote a song for her, too.  It’s called “Piinuts”, after the name she came with, but given a spelling like her new name.  The gist of it is about having “searched for Chances, but ending up with Piinuts.  It all came down to Piinuts”.  I tried to have the music tell a story by having several movements which come full circle at the end back to the starting point.

She came with a thyroid problem (hypothyroidism), of which I was aware going in.  She takes a very cheap synthetic hormone to correct the problem, as people do for the same illness.  However, she also had two seizures in my first 11 days with her (day 3 and 11).  When I contacted the foster parents, they were unaware of this problem in her and were rather shocked.  As I said, they were not a part of the rescue itself, and I doubt they were ever duplicitous regarding her health.  They are a young couple, they both work, and they may simply never have seen any evidence of seizures.

The woman had offered that they had set off a Hartz flea bomb about a month before I’d adopted her.  Furgii had never seemed effected, but the couple’s own Jack Russell had thrown up for three days afterward.  I mentioned this to my vet, but he didn’t think it factored in.  She was diagnosed as epileptic.

Of course, after my stepson’s abuse, the dissolution of my marriage, the five weeks with Chance (I do believe THAT “rescue” party failed to disclose his problems), I thought at this point that God hated me.  Something about the seizures never sat right with me, though.  Could they be from the flea bomb, after all, combined with having gotten comfortable at the foster home for six months after being on the street for an unknown length of time?  Now she was uprooted again.  Plus the foster home has two people and two other dogs, whereas here it was just me (a stranger) and no other pets?

After a year on the phenobarbital, I decided I needed to know for sure:  Did she need this medicine?  Long term use can cause organ problems, and it increased her hunger and thirst to unbelievable levels.  She’d always sniff around on the carpet hoping for something to eat, and then she’d beg all day.  When no food was forthcoming, she’d drink her entire water bowl just to fill her stomach with something.  This of course led to some accidents, but I felt bad that her experience was governed by a manic insatiability.  It had to be horrible for her.

I slowly, slowly, slowly decreased her phenobarbital doses starting in May from a full pill twice per day to a full pill in the morning and a half at night.  In August, I made it half a pill each time.  Just before Halloween, I would give her a half in the morning, and sometimes none in the evening if I was going to be home to observe her.  Finally, I was on vacation from October 29 through November 6.  I had run out of her pills, so it seemed like the time to cut it out all together.  At no point in the weening process had I seen a seizure or witnessed evidence of it, such as having vomited or eliminated in the apartment.

It is now three and a half weeks off of it, and still no episodes.  Her appetite and behavior are back to normal.  It was a hard decision to make to take her off the medicine.  I can’t imagine what I would have felt like if I was wrong.  But, whether as a pet parent or the parent of a human child, these are decisions we have to make.  In fact, I’ve had to make those as a human parent, too.

So, there’s the Ballad of The Furg.  I started this post not knowing what to write about, blabbered about her bath, and ended with her life story (as I know it).

Hope you enjoyed learning about her as much as I enjoy having her be my pet!