One night after an uneventful day in July, Barclay was restless and whiny and couldn’t lay down and go to sleep like he normally would have after dinner. He would come bark at me like he wanted something. We even took him for an extra walk, but he still couldn’t settle down.

I was really worried since it was out of character, so we took him to the vet around 10pm, and the vet decided he might have hurt his back, gave us some pain meds and sent him home. We got home and I took him outside for a potty break, and he flopped over on his side and had a seizure! We called the vet and they said we could bring him back in, or observe him and see if the pain med helped, so we decided to do that since it would be less stressful. But he continued to be whiny and restless, and just couldn’t go to sleep. By then it was 2am, and we were all very tired, and he just couldn’t stop, then he had another seizure and threw up, so we raced him back to the emergency vet.

This time the vet said she thought the whole thing was seizure related. The vet decided to keep him, and we were waiting in the exam room while they got a spot ready for him in the back, and I put him in my lap and he finally fell asleep for a couple minutes, he was so tired!

They gave him medicine to stop the seizures and kept him until the next day, but we were there until after 4am by that point. So i called in sick to work the next day and worried about him all day. Wednesday afternoon he came home, and they gave him an anti-seizure medicine, which sedated him a bit. The vet said it would get better in 2-3 weeks as he got used to the medicine. Navi was happy to have him back, and hung out right with him.

But it’s was hard to get him to eat. We were fussing over him, trying to get him to eat anything, because he was never fat, and I’m worried about him not eating enough. I bought him different dog foods, people food, baby food, but nothing much interested him. Dave and I were handfeeding him all kinds of good food just to get something in him. He seemed like he would take a few bites to be polite, then turn his head away to say he was done.

Also, he was waking us up multiple times a night barking for what seemed like no particular reason. Everyone was getting really tired. It was like having an infant in the house. He didn’t mean it though, he was tired too!

After three weeks of this, he wet the bed overnight a couple times, so I talked to the vet and she decided the side effects were too much, and had me wean him off of the medicine. We quickly saw improvement, with him getting his appetite back, sleeping better, and not being so groggy.

So far so good. He is 11, and has been very healthy, though he did have two or three seizure incidents over the past few years, which the vets could find no reason for. He hasn’t had a seizure since that night. Hopefully he will not have any more issues for a while.