Storm R.I.P.

Storm 2013 -2021
Storm Checks Out An Acquaintance

Last night we had to have our dog Storm put to sleep.  He'd been suffering from idiopathic epilepsy for the last three years, since he was six.  He was already being given the maximum dose of phenobarbital, and other anti-seizure medication.  Yet, the frequency and number of seizures had continued to increase.  We would spend 24 hours, nursing him through such occasions, staying awake all night to do so.  At its worst, he was having 13 seizures in  a day.  In the last few weeks he'd seemed to improve, going slightly longer between episodes, and on the previous occasion he had gone six weeks without an episode, and only suffered one brief seizure.  This time he'd gone more than five weeks, and we were hoping for something similar.

On Saturday morning, he seemed fine, as we took him out for the first of the four or five regular walks he had each day, but we had only gone around 100 metres, when the first seizure struck out of the blue.  My wife and I, managed to half carry, half walk him back to the house, but a second seizure struck just metres from the front door.  We managed to get him in the house, so that he could recover, providing him with lots of old quilts to prevent him damaging himself during any seizure.   Then it seemed to have passed, but his sight, which frequently goes during such episodes, did not come back after the normal 20 minutes or so.  But, he was able to stand, and walk, and we assumed that his distress, was due to this loss of sight.  We walked him around the garden, non-stop from 10 a.m. until around 5 p.m.

Then another seizure struck.  We had been given some phenobarbital to administer anally in such events, and reluctantly decided to use them.  I say reluctantly, because observation of the use of them in the past seemed to suggest that they made him more anxious and stressed, which is one of the side-effects described for them.  From there he seemed to get worse, being distressed, and unable to stand.  As it did not seem to be passing, we decided it was necessary to contact the emergency vets, and had to drive across the city to get him seen.

The vet, told us that he was fitting as he carried him in, even though it had not seemed like the fits we were used to seeing, and had assumed that it was just his anxious state.  Having administered a strong sedative, that did not seem to have worked, given his extremely agitated state.  They told us that they could basically knock him out, and bring him back to consciousness gradually, in the hope that as they did, the fits would have stopped, but they could not guarantee they would.  As we have had tests for liver and kidney function done on him, and they came  back negative, and as he is otherwise, a very fit, strong active dog, the vets have previously told us that his fits are idiopathic, i.e. the cause of them is unknown.  The emergency vet told us that, as he was on the maximum dosage, and was fitting this much, the likelihood was that the cause was a brain tumour, but that, in any case, the prognosis was not very good.  In any case, as he had been fitting, it appeared for much of the day, that in itself would have been likely to have caused him brain damage.

So, we had to prevent him from suffering further, and allow him to slip away peacefully.  Our first greyhound, Timmy, we acquired as an ex-racer from Belle Vue, when he was 4.   He lived until he was 14, although, for the last 4 years, he had been suffering from lymphoma.  We had Storm from a puppy, brought home from Swadlincote in a cardboard box.  He sat on my lap, as a bundle of fluff on the settee, and I carried him in my arms along the country lanes where we lived, until he was able to toddle along besides us, sitting and watching attentively, whenever we came to a road crossing, or when something he had not seen before, passed by.  Its hard, in this first 24 hours, not to have been keeping an ear open for him overnight, while in bed, wanting to be taken into the garden, and not to look across to the settee, he had made his own, and expect to see him stretched full out on his back, legs akimbo, and his equipment full on show.