As I have written before, life with a seizure dog is challenging. Seizures come without warning and are terrifying for the hoomans who are around.
We medicate four times a day (anti-seizure medications and his thyroid medication), and have added some canna-companion (a hemp based anti seizure herb for pets). We keep an eye out for signs that a seizure is pending, called an “aura”, and extra medicate when we suspect one, but in the end, whenever the chemical imbalance in his brain gets to a critical point, the seizure will happen.
We had been tapering off the phenobarbital as it has long term liver toxicity issues, and the frequency went up. A lot. Tate was having seizures every two weeks like clockwork. I don’t have to tell you that was stressful to deal with. So we inched that back up.
And we added some hemp based adjunct to the diet. After lots of research, it seems clear that there is some benefit to the use of cannabis for the controlling of seizures in animals, so why not. This product has almost none of the psychoactive chemicals, so it is a bit safer than going the full medicinal marijuana route and looking for low potency strains to try.
The good news, the seizure we had Friday in the early AM was 5 weeks to the day from the last one. Woo hoo, headed in the right direction.
Realistically, and what the vets and veterinary neurologists say, controlling them to once a month is a good goal to have. While we would like to have a frequency of never, that is really not a likely result.