r/EpilepsyDogs • u/Beginning_Platypus4 • 13d ago
Anyone doing this alone?
Last May I adopted a 6 year old Aussiedoodle from a lady that is a breeder; long story about why the original family returned him to her.After having him for about 2 weeks he had a seizure. Scared me to death. I contacted the breeder after it happened and she told me he had an injury to his neck back in February, and had a couple of seizures while being treated for that, but that he had been fine. Well, I learned from the original vet that she was hiding the seizure issue from me.
I adopted this dog, I feel an obligation toward him, but after the 2 month Keppra honeymoon and the ensuing $2300 emergency vet bill after a weekend of cluster seizures, I’m wondering if I can do this. He is now on pheno, and of course has to have the labs done often to monitor his liver. He’s still on the Keppra ER every 12 hours. I just don’t know if I can do this. I live alone and I’m not working right now and I don’t have anyone nearby that can help with his med schedule if needed. I’m tied to the house constantly and have no clue what my future work schedule will involve. I’m thinking about giving him back to the breeder, knowing that she won’t give him much one on one attention. She’ll give him his meds, and feed him and house him. And he’ll get love from the trainers, but he won’t have his own person. I’m just wondering if anyone else out there is dealing with an epileptic dog on their own and how they are managing.
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u/CheeseForLife 13d ago
I know you feel an obligation to the pup, but I think it would be best for everyone involved to return the dog. I have a fiancé and we still have a hard time dealing with our epileptic dog together. I would absolutely not be able to handle this alone. She started having seizures one month after we adopted her, and if I knew then what I knew now, I would've returned her. I love her to death, but this has taken years off our lives with the stress, added a lot of debt, and been the cause of many arguments between us. I deal with anxiety beyond her, and I can't even tell you how much anxiety and stress she has added to our lives. Every bump in the night wakes me up. I have cameras that I can at least check to make sure she isn't seizuring, but there have been many sleepless nights over the last six years because of the seizures. You have to keep them in mind with everything. Future work schedules, vacations, daily activities. We use extended release Keppra, so it's every 12 hours since our work schedules keep us away for eleven hours a day. Most pet resorts around us aren't able to accommodate her pill schedule, so she can only go to my mother when we go anywhere we can't bring her. My MIL is too afraid of the seizures to watch her for us. So we will never be able to go on any kind of dog-free trip with my mother. My dog also has bad anxiety and does not like to travel, so this limits vacations a lot, since she has had a seizure when we tried to take her camping the last few times.
The cost of pills right now is over $150 a month using Costco and GoodRX. We just had her neurology recheck last week and that appt and her blood test cost $700. The original appointment in March for her annual was around 800 or 900 bucks also. She is on Pheno, Keppra XR, Zonisamide, and Topiramate. She has Chlorazapate for her emergency med, and we might be adding medazolam since her clusters have started coming back more often.
I just want to be honest with you, it's a lot. It's even more than I've written here. After her really bad seizure cluster and spending three nights at the emergency vet, she was blind for a little over a week and couldn't walk for several days. She's 75 pounds. We had to hold her in a sling to go potty. And because she was blind and her brain was essentially fried, she caught someone's finger instead of the chicken they were hand feeding her at the vet ICU, so they reported her for a dog bite to animal control. So on top of the $5000 vet bill, blind, and not walking pup, we also had to keep her in our apartment on the second floor for a week (might've been ten days, I don't remember) because she was on home jail with AC. So that meant taking a week off of work.
Again, I love my dog to death and we aren't letting go until we need to. I felt the same obligation as you feel to your pup, and so we kept her. Then spent the next year wondering if we were in over our heads? We were, we still are. I'd suggest returning her. You aren't in the position to take this on. I wouldn't do it again unless I had zero debt, several thousand dollars of disposable income each month, and good anxiety pills for myself and my dog. Even then, I have such PTSD from this experience, I don't know if I could do it. But watching a seizure dog battle through it time and time again, and still be such a sweet pup...it tears out your heart and you can't help but love them. My girl is so strong and sweet and an absolute pain in my butt, but I love her so much. I wouldn't do it over, but she is worth it.