Poor little Lucy...

Because I don’t have children, one of the scariest things that could happen to me is when one of my dogs is unwell. It sounds silly, but they really do become your fur-kids. I was raised under the belief that pets were part of the family, and that they are to be treated as such. And so, you become very attached to them.

Thursday night, Lucy woke us in the middle of the night having a seizure. She sleeps on the end of our bed, and I could feel her stiffen and heard her start to whimper. She looked very odd, and woke James knowing something wasn’t right. Then, if you could imagine it her whole body locked up and she threw her head back as if her whole spine had been shortened. It was then she started screaming – later we were told it wasn’t out of pain, but because she probably had no idea what was happening and she was distressed as to why couldn’t move her body.

I had the animal hospital on the phone (yes, they do exist) and they confirmed a seizure and to bring her in. I was honestly waiting for her to have a heart attack – and half expected James to call me back saying she’d died. But, 5 minutes passed and everything slowly came back to normal, and after watching her for 30 minutes we thought it was best to find out what was going on (now 2am).

So, it turns out that Lucy most likely has epilepsy and if the seizures become a regular occurrence that she will have to go on medication for the rest of her life. I felt so sad that it was something we couldn’t really control, and that leading up to the battery of blood tests it was a wait-and-see approach.

I was, (and still am until confirmed) secretly hoping that she was poisoned in some way – by a plant in the backyard or by something she’d eaten – and that was it wasn’t anything serious and could fix the problem. It was awful. And the poor thing can’t actually tell me what’s going on.

Lucy is supposedly purebred, which means that I have to contact the people we got her from, to let them know if they are still breeding the same animals to stop because of the bad gene. So a word of caution – although we didn’t purposely set out to buy pure bread, and would have taken her if she was a mongrel – make sure you check breeder history. This is why I think random everyday people should NOT be breeding animals, and only registered professionals should be allowed to. Every animal should have to be de-sexed unless specially classified.

Of course, I am happy to deal with it for as long as I have to, but imagine the puppies out there that are destined to spend their lives on medication? Or the ones that are abandoned because their owners don’t want to look after a dog that needs extra attention? It makes me so angry when I think about it.