Hank is our six year old black Lab and he had another seizure last night. He’s been having them periodically for three or four years. I thought at first they were related to how active he’d been during the day because it seemed like he had them every time we went to Idaho and took him hiking. I started acclimatizing him, leaving him house bound for the first few days of our trips, then only doing short hikes so he didn’t overdo it. My youngest couldn’t believe her luck when the dog saved her from having to hike the longer trails. We never showed HER that mercy. Yesterday morning I did take the dogs running, but I only went three miles and they are used to that a few times a week. Maybe it has nothing to do with exercise at all, and just seems coincidental that Hank has seizures after workouts. But it always happens in the middle of the night, and last night was no different.
I set my alarm for 1:30 a.m. because my youngest had a fever of 102.4. Whenever her temperature goes above 101 she gets night terrors, and though she doesn’t remember them, they are so traumatic for me to witness that I didn’t want to risk her fever returning in the middle of the night and triggering one. She wakes up screaming scary gibberish, her eyes open but unseeing, as if she’s in a trance. The first time it happened we took her to the ER it was so terrifying. So while waking my kid up in the middle of the night to cram a Motrin down her throat was purely for my benefit, as my husband told me, having read that it’s better to let a sick kid sleep, he conveniently decided to sleep in the guest room and therefore wouldn’t be bothered by either my alarm or a scene out of The Exorcist. I tried to get my oldest to agree to dose his sister at 1:30 a.m., but he said he was going to bed soon. Not sure I could have trusted him to remember anyway.
I went to sleep around 10:30 p.m. I woke up at 11:20 p.m. and then again at 12:40 a.m., worried I wouldn’t hear my phone alarm. I woke up a third time at 1:20 a.m., turned off my alarm, and stumbled down the hall to my daughter’s room. I turned on her light, slightly apprehensive that I might trigger a night terror by waking her. She felt warm, but not hot, stirring as she felt my hand on her forehead. She opened her eyes and sat up, thankfully coherent. She swallowed the Motrin, drinking through a straw from her glass of water, and laid back down. As I turned off her light, shut her door and walked back down the hall to my room, I could hear my son talking to his friend in the kitchen, still, irritatingly, up.
I finally fell back to sleep until 4:00 a.m. when I heard thumping from the bottom of the stairs. I knew immediately it was Hank having a seizure. What were the chances? Trying to prevent a seizure-like episode in my daughter, I drew a real seizure from Hank. I couldn’t ignore it and roll back over to sleep because though he eventually comes out of it, he makes a huge mess. In his epilectic thrashings he froths at the mouth, loses control of his bodily functions, poops and pees all over himself. I put my bathrobe and slippers on and went downstairs to him. Charlie was circling him in a wide berth, looking at him to me in bewilderment. I put my hand on his body and spoke to him soothingly, and Charlie came running to vie for attention. I pushed her away, but she came back, getting in the way. Finally I had to put her in the bathroom. Hank quieted after a few moments, body still shuddering, but not as violently. I quickly went to get paper towels before he got up and spread his mess around. Luckily he was on the tile floor. He had peed on his bed and he was wet all over one side. There was poop in crumbling chunks (too much protein in the venison) scattered nearby. His face was covered in white froth. I wiped it as best as I could while he struggled against me. He lurched to his feet and I guided him outside where it was pouring rain. I put Charlie out too. Then I cleaned up the floor with paper towels, got out the vinegar from under the sink and mopped. I dragged his bed outside, too tired to manhandle the cover off. I needed a beach towel so I headed down to the basement and then went outside to hose him off. Now it was 4:30 a.m. I was in the pouring rain in my bathrobe, hosing urine off my dog, and cursing my husband as if it were his fault.
After cleaning Hank as well as I could with cold water, too tired to use shampoo, I dried him with the towel and let both dogs back in the house. Then I checked the kitchen and put all things edible out of reach because after a seizure Hank gets obsessed with food in a much more savage way than normal. I shut the pantry door, picked up the rabbit food and litter off the floor, shut Cocoa’s cage door just in case Hank turned feral, turned off the lights and went back upstairs to bed. He followed me, but I wouldn’t let him in my room. He is so disoriented after a seizure that he paces, his claws loudly clicking on the wood floor, and he cries piteously for hours. I put my earplugs in, put a pillow over my head to muffle more sound, and tried to go to sleep. None of the kids woke, naturally.
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