prayers for Charlie

If anybody is out there reading this blog, please say a prayer for my Charlie girl. She is in the hospital tonight.

She had a seizure around 7:30 pm. That's not completely unusual, she has seizures every 4-6 months but this one was different. Usually she snaps out of it within 5 minutes and is back to normal. 

This time she didn't snap out of it, she continued to shake and her back legs were weak so she couldn't walk normally. After a bit of this I called the emergency vet clinic and was told to bring her in.

Then her tail started wagging so I thought she was getting better but then she started shaking and I knew it couldn't wait until morning to see our regular vet.

The emergency clinic is 40 minutes away from our house and I'd never been there before. I loaded her up and started down the road. Then she started having another seizure so I drove the entire way one-handed because I needed my other hand to keep petting her, telling her she was a good girl and that she was going to make it the whole way to the clinic.

She was still in a seizure when we got there so they took her back immediately and started working on her.

Eventually the doctor came to talk to me to tell me that she probably had epilepsy, which didn't surprise me. But then he came back and said she was still having muscle tremors (although she wasn't in a seizure anymore) and that surprised him because he'd given her a lot of medicine. He started asking questions about things she might have gotten into, thinking that we were dealing with a toxin rather than epilepsy. But I didn't have any good answers for him because she hadn't gotten into anything that I knew of.

Hours went by and all I did was worry. Then the door opened and they brought her to me. She had stopped trembling, no tremors and apparently she was barking a lot back in the ER so they decided it might do her good to spend time with me. They left me with a "doorbell" to push in case she seemed to be in distress.

She was hyper, walking around a lot. Her back legs were still a little weak but other than that, she seemed her normal self. Once she barked because she heard a dog and when a cat meowed loudly she had a puzzled look on her face. She really wanted out of the examining room so I picked her up and we went for a walk around the waiting room. It was 11:30 by this point and we'd been there for over 3 hours.

Finally she got sleepy so I scrunched myself onto the little bench and let her fall asleep in my lap. And that's how the doctor found us. He said that her tests had come back normal so he was now inclined to believe that it wasn't a toxin and that she had just been so hyped up and anxious, it took a long time for the epilepsy meds to kick in. 

So it was back to the original plan, Charlie was going to stay overnight at the hospital and be pumped full of epilepsy medications. Because she had several seizures, he didn't want to take 2 weeks of pills to get her to the level of medication she needed to stop seizures. So she's loading 24 hours of meds to get to that level. He said she'll sleep through it all. 

Of course I won't relax until she's back home and normal and I won't relax even then. My childhood dog had epilepsy and had to take 2 pills a day throughout her life. She lived to be almost 15 so the idea of epilepsy doesn't scare me, I just want to get to the point where the meds are doing their job.

Please pray for Charlie and for me.  It's 2 in the morning right now and I doubt I'll get much sleep before it's time to get up and go to work and worry until they call and tell me I can come pick her up.