Thursday, March 8, 2012

Whole Lot of Shakin' Going On

The good news is Turner can detect seizures.  The bad news is he detects his own seizures.  He has had at least three seizures.  The first two he lost the ability to control some, but not all of his legs and it lasted for a few minutes.  It never occur to us that they were seizures, I thought his hips locked and he was showing symptoms of hip dysplasia. As it turns out those were petit mal seizures.  The one he had last night was a grand mal with shaking and lasted about five minutes.  Thanks to over breeding, epilepsy is prevalent in breeds like labs and his newish flea/worm medicine (which I just bought a years worth!) can increase seizure frequency in epileptic dogs.  So far three seizures in 2.5 years is nothing to worry about, in fact the vet said he could have petit mals every day with no ill effects.  When he begins having five or more seizures a year, then we need to start him on medication to control his epilepsy.

Here is a video of another chocolate lab having a seizure (there are A LOT of YouTube videos of labs having seizures) so you can see what his first two seizures looked like. 

And yes, Brian was right...we should have purchased pet insurance years ago!

1 comment:

  1. Poor Turner!!!!

    And he is like mom and dad - no one would ever insure them now!

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