News and Views

I’ve posted before about Apollo having occasional seizures. These are full-blown grand mal seizures, lasting a minute or so, then taking 5 – 10 minutes to fully recover.

The vet diagnosed epilepsy, not uncommon for huskies. He averaged maybe one seizure every two or three months, and the vet said as long as they don’t happen more often than once a month, nothing needed to be done. Just live with them.

It went on this way for about 3 years. Then about two months ago, he had a normal seizure. A month later another one. A week later, again. Then 20 hours later. Then 3 hours later. We didn’t like this trend at all, so we took him to the pet emergency room, where he spent the night under observation. No more seizures that night, but they said it is time to start treating him.

After a visit to the Veterinary Neurological Institute (which fortunately happens to have one of their two national centers about 10 miles from our house), he has started taking twice daily doses of phenobarbital. I knew phenobarbitol was a depressant, but looking it up on Wikipedia I see that its main use now is as the “first line treatment” for seizures, in both humans and canines.

Unfortunately, it has side effects. The first week or so it made him hyper (which the vet said to expect). He stayed up all night whining and yipping, and broke out of the kitchen and woke us up by jumping up on our bed one morning. Then he transitioned into a sedated state, spending most of the day lying on the floor. When he tried to stand his legs sometimes slid out from under him and he walked very slowly.

After two weeks he is starting to get used to it, and is a lot more normal the past couple of days. He seems to have regained a passion for playing fetch with his ball, dropping it at our feet multiple times a day, saying “Let’s go out back and you throw the ball for me!”.

Unfortunately, the vet said that he is due for an increase in dose. I hesitate to put him back in that groggy state again, after seeing the old Apollo showing up, but I guess we should follow medical advice. We’ll probably wait another day or two.

So far no seizures since that bad day. Let’s hope it stays that way — if he starts to seize again, we will have to increase the dose, or even put him on other drugs with worse side effects.