Lola's Scary Night

On Monday night we had quite the drama at our house. I got home from work around 7:15pm and we went through our normal routine: the dogs ate, they went outside, I ate dinner, and we sat down to watch some TV. The dogs were all playing while I was watching TV like normal. Around 8pm Garrett came home and as he walked through the door, I heard Lola yelp. I was wondering what had happened and she came running over to me. She was looking at me weird and as I was trying to figure out what was going on, she started trembling. Then she was hunching down towards the floor and at this point, I knew something was really wrong. I started yelling at Garrett to get the other dogs outside because they were jumping around and getting in my way. As Garrett was getting them out the back door, Lola tried to walk over to him, but couldn't walk. She was losing her balance. She sat down, but you could tell something was wrong. Then, all of a sudden, her eyes went back in her head and she started having a seizure. She fell over, but Garrett luckily caught her. At this point, I ran upstairs in a nervous panic to put my jeans on. I ran back downstairs and she was still seizuring. Then I went out to the garage and opened up the car door and Garrett carried her out to the car while she was still shaking. I had to run back in the house because I didn't grab a cell phone, but when I came back out the garage a few seconds later, her seizure had stoped. And about 2 minutes into the car ride she was acting completely normal again.

We drove down to the Sumner Vet hospital which is less than 10 minutes from our house. When we got there, the emergency doctor on shift had just gone into a surgery, so the nurse was relaying between us and the doctor in surgery. We had a couple of options at this point. The first was to just take her home and watch her. If she seizured again, they told us to bring her back in right away. The other option was to wait an hour to see the doctor and he could run blood work to see if there was anything wrong. We ended up just taking her home to watch her, but we made an appointment for her on Tuesday to stay the day at the hospital under observation while we were both at work.

When we got home after the hospital, Lola was still acting just fine. She wanted to play, but I made her just relax and take it easy. I slept downstairs for most of the night because I was so afraid she was going to seizure again and I wanted to be able to watch her closely. I got about 3 hours of sleep that whole night because I kept hallucinating in my sleep that she was seizuring, so I woke up about every 10 minutes.

Tuesday morning, I took her back to the hospital so she could spend the day there. I called them around 12:30pm to check on her. The tech told me she was resting at the time, and still no more seizures. I made an appointment with the doctor at 6:30pm on my way home from work. When I got there, he discussed things with me. There are many different reasons dogs can have seizures. Labs are one breed who are prone to them. He said it is most common between the ages of 2 and 4 and usually these seizures are not anything bad. He said I can either take her home and wait to see if she has any others or start some testing. I choose to have the first step of testing done, complete blood work. This is mainly for my sanity so I can sleep. I need to know that nothing is wrong that they can prevent. The next step would be an MRI, but that would only be necessary if she kept having the seizures.

I should find out part of the blood test results today, hopefully sooner than later. Then the second half of the tests I will find out the next day or two. The part I find out today is the most important part, so that is good. I will keep you updated. Say a prayer for my little girl, we love her so much!