Some of you may already know if you've spoken to Jan.
During the early hours of Monday morning last week. I was disturbed by an almighty racket downstairs. I ran down to see what was going on and imagine my distress to see my beloved Bentley throwing himself all over the floor, clearly in the throes of a massive seizure.
Oh dear Lord. What to do.
I'll spare you the details, suffice to say that my darling boy didn't recognise me and was in a state of terror and confusion. Quiet words and trying to approach him made him far worse.
All we could do was retreat to a distance out of his sight and wait for the whole sorry episode to end. Which it did after about fifteen hours, sorry, I meant minutes, It just felt like fifteen hours. The actual seizure lasted less than a minute.
I knew it was over when the barking stopped, I spoke to him and he gave me a feeble wag of his tail. At that point I could tell he recognised me again.
A trip to the vet saw us referred straight down to Liverpool Small Animal Hospital, and they were amazing. After a barrage of tests they told us what I'd been dreading hearing, that Bentley has epilepsy.
At the moment we are monitoring him to establish how frequent his seizures are likely to be. He hasn't suffered any more major seizures but has had a couple of petite mals.
I went into complete panic. What if he has a seizure while I'm out with him and Ellie? What if this happened? What if that happened? My head was in a spin.
Jan was almost my first port of call. What a star, she talked me straight off the ceiling with her calm, no nonsense approach.
So. What have I learned?
Epilepsy makes my boy even more special to me.
Epilepsy is not the end of the world.
It can be controlled with drugs if necessary but hopefully seizures will be few and far between.
They are not likely to happen while we are out and about, they are far more likely to happen at night.
If he has a seizure there really is nothing to be done except wait for it to finish. I've changed the room round so as to minimise the possibility of him hurting himself if he does have one.
He cannot swallow his tongue.
There are warning signs. If we can catch it before it really starts we have emergency medication we can give him which could stop it in it's tracks. Maybe not the actual seizure, which lasts less than a minute, but the distressing phase after it.
Life goes on.
Bentley is still Bentley.
As you can see from Tuesday's antics:
Ellie thinks the paddling pool is hers, it's not. It's Bentley's really.
Here he is taking over the filling of it and keeping nice and cool, as well as having a sneaky drink.
s
