My darling little pibble, Zusje (playing with her big bro, my Rotty/Border Collie when she was just 4 months old) is dead. At the tender age of two and a half.
Long painful story as short as possible while still making sense: she had epilepsy.
Seizures are not, in themselves, particularly dangerous. Except when they cluster together over a short period of time, because there is a very strong likelihood that clusters can become what is known as status epilepticus: continuous seizures without any return to consciousness in between. Status epilepticus is deadly.
The more often a dog (or a person!) has a seizure, the more likely they are to have more seizures, more often, and the greater the risk of status and death. Therefore it becomes especially important with “clusterers” to stop the seizures as rapidly as possible. The standard way this is done is with liquid valium provided to the dog owner in rectal syringes, ready to apply as soon as seizing begins.
Zusje had her first seizure May 18. Second one 3 weeks later. Then another five days after that, then 24 hours after that, then five hours. Vet check, started on phenobarbital.
From that point forward every seizure meant cluster seizures, which also increased in frequency and intensity. Once it got so bad I was afraid she was going into SE and I had to take her to the (very expensive) emergency vet, because it was nighttime. (That was something else: with two exceptions, every single time she had seizures she had them at night, usually between 9 and midnight). She actually stopped seizing before we got to the vet but I took her in anyway to get the syringes. They gave me two, which were both the wrong (too low) dose.
But it was a damn sight better than my vet, who flatly refused to provide me with the valium. Her reasoning was vague, the only thing she would say was that it was a “controlled substance”. Yes, and…? You’re an animal doctor with a license, right? You have a DEA number, right? You know that this is the standard protocol for cluster seizures, right?
She and I went back and forth about this, and she never gave me a straight, logically, meaningful answer about her unwillingness to give me the valium, apart from the “controlled substance”-ness. She also didn’t direct me to an alternative source, nor did she give me any other actions or solutions for the issue of cluster seizures hitting at midnight, and she is 100% aware of the fact that I am extremely low-income, emergency vet visits are not something I am in any position to make a regular part of my budget.
Well, Zusje had a terrible cluster episode, and I immediately started assembling every resource I could find to prove to my vet that she needed to provide the valium- looking up veterinary colleges, scholarly papers, etc. - all of which said exactly what I knew they said: valium up the butt. Standard. I also got to work on a letter to my vet, containing every possible bit of information she could want about me and everything she needed to run her own background check, so she could see that if her fear was that I was drug-seeking, well, that fear was extremely misplaced.
But 48 hours after the big episode, while I was marshaling my arguments, Zusje went into status epilepticus. I didn’t know how long she’d already been seizing when I found her, it took 45 minutes to get her to the emergency vet, and the next two days were a nightmare that ended in my euthanizing her.
If I had had the valium, I would have stopped a few dozen seizures. If I had had the valium, I would have given it to her when she was in status while I was trying to get her to the emergency vet.
She probably wasn’t going to live to a ripe old age, I understand that. But there is no question in my mind that my vet’s irrational and inexplicable decision to refuse to provide me with the front line, default treatment for dogs that cluster absolutely led to Zusje’s death two weeks ago.
Why? What the fuck? I am a 57 year old woman, not some bicker chick meth head. My vet did finally provide one syringe during the two days that Zusje was dying… but talk about too little, too late.
So has anyone else run across anything like this?
