Lucy has been a fairly healthy dog for us. However, she has had a very infrequent history of having seizures. She has only had a hand-full of them in her whole life (that we know of), but they are pretty major when they occur. The first one occurred back in 2012, when she was only about three or four years old. We were never able to figure that at even though she visited the vet about it, and was even taken to the Washington State University Veterinarian Training Hospital in Pullman, Washington. Luckily, after that first seizure no more were to occur for a few years. Therefore, she was never on any medication for seizures. I understand that this is a good thing as common seizure medication has some pretty bad side effects.

Here she is in the moving truck, when we moved back to Washington in April of 2016.

She sporadically had a seizure here and there, but it was not a major issue in her life. When she first began to become ill in what eventually as become this struggle for her life happened in the summer of 2019 – so about seven or eight months ago. At least this is our best guess.

Lucy’s bathroom characteristics seemed to change about then. We noticed that she was starting to have bouts with occasional diarrhea. In addition, she started to have gas and it was pretty stinky! This eventually led to a visit to a local veterinarian. While she was gassy and stinking up the room from time to time, we were not seeing anything that really concerned us much. We started to work on her diet. We changed her food, taking her off of the Kirkland(Costco) brand Salmon food that she had been eating for quite a few years. Nothing that we were seeing was an indication to us that she was possibly starting to have major health concerns. These were the kind of changes that one would equate to aging for the most part. Lucy acted like she was a puppy half the time. She was strong and vital, she had all of her smarts, and she seemed like she was a healthy adult dog in just about every respect.

At some point in the Summer / Fall of 2019, she had a seizure again. This occurred in the night, and it woke us up. We of course ran to her, kept her safe, and got a cold wash cloth for her head. She recovered from this pretty quickly as she always had in the very few times it had previously occurred. Maybe it was this seizure, but we decided to get her back into the vet.