Seizure # 45. Quite a surprise, as I had dozed off and Milk was curled up in my right arm. I don't know what woke me. When I looked over, he had a little foam dripping off his mouth, but he hadn't started to seize, so I quickly picked him off my arm and put him on my lap, with my hand firmly on his abdomen, hopefully out of reach of his claws. Which I trimmed last night, but which were still like razors. Very little movement of anything but his head - a lot of volume with the growling and snarling, and two very harsh, different pitches during the course of the seizure. When it was done - seemed longer than usual, although I'm not sure and I didn't think to look at the clock - he just lay against my stomach. I started to wipe him off, and it brought on a lot of tiny little jerks from his front legs and from his head, so I stopped. After about 4 or 5 minutes, he jumped down, very uncoordinated, and went to eat. He never eats quite right anyway, even when he hasn't just had a seizure - something about the way he licks up food isn't right - and this looked very awkward. He moved all around the bowl before he was done. And then he wanted more, so he checked out all of the other dishes while I fixed him a fresh can of FF. His coordination is still very poor, almost a half hour after the seizure. He keeps wandering around across my desk and keyboard. Which, come to think of it, he was doing earlier tonight. I had to go out around 7:30, and he was sleeping on the bench beside my desk. When I came back, around 10:00, he was still sleeping there. He got up to see what was for supper, but didn't eat anything. And he was doing the same kind of annoying wandering around on the desk then, too. Very persistent, up and down, onto the floor, onto the bench, onto the desk, knock over my (empty) mug, and around all over again. I wonder if that was significant behavior. There has never been anything in the past year+ that I could say seemed to be a signal that a seizure was about to occur.
I was feeling very glad this morning that I hadn't increased the phenobarbital. It seemed, silly me, like the Keppra increase was going to be sufficient. After all, three days without a seizure? Surely an indication of a cure..... Damn it. I think that I am going to increase the PB, by a small amount - maybe a quarter of a pill for this last dosage of the day at 2 AM and see if that helps. I hate to have to keep dragging him out for blood work, but I don't want to ever get the point where his liver is at risk again. And maybe the report from Auburn will suggest that it would be okay to increase his Keppra. (Although that didn't seem very successful last week when I tried it for one day. And although I don't know if that's even something that Auburn does. If they don't already have standards set, I suppose they'll just give an amount and add him to their database.)
My poor little white boy. When he's had a seizure, the pink areas around his eyes and ears get very discolored and bizarre looking. And his whole face gets sort of pinched-appearing. Plus, Dr. G. had to shave his neck to get the blood from his jugular this time because he couldn't get enough out of his thighs. Both of them. So his wispy little neck has this big gap in it where there's no fur at all. I'm not sure why this one has been so disturbing, but I don't usually cry after he has a seizure, and I'm sitting here now with tears rolling down my cheeks. I just want this to stop. I want him to have a normal life and I want to not have to worry about doing more damage with the stupid medications. It's so unfair to him.
