There are only ways to patch it up. When you reduce the size of the patch…
I’m not sure just how long ago it was—sometime last fall, I think—our dog, Kao, was diagnosed with diabetes. Since we hadn’t recognized the symptoms or done anything to treat it when they first arose, she began to have epileptic seizures. We took her to the vet, she prescribed insulin and phenobarbitol (an anti-convulsant), we started giving Kao the medications and everything seemed fine. She had been reading negative on her urine tests for a pretty long time, so about a month ago, the vet said we could reduce her twice-daily injections of insulin from 15cc to 13cc.
Flash ahead to a month later. Today. 6:10am. Dad took Kao for a walk and she had another seizure. Since he and Mom were leaving for the weekend to visit friends, I have “dog duty”—walk her and give her meds, food and water—tonight, tomorrow morning and maybe more if their trip runs longer than expected. They left about four hours ago, so I was just dinking around until about 4:00. I figured that maybe Kao would like a quick afternoon walk before dog duty tonight at 6, so I headed out to her kennel.
When I first got there, I noticed two puddles of urine on the concrete. For those of you who don’t know, one symptom of diabetes is water running straight through the system. Kao would pee twice during her walk (instead of once), then get back to the kennel and immediately slurp up about half her bowl of water. The same thing happened this morning when Dad took her for a walk, so we knew what the problem was this time. Well, technically, we didn’t realized it was a problem until her seizure this morning.
We normally walk up and down the road in front of our property, which is maybe 70-80 yards with the house somewhere in the middle. (That’s a wild estimate—I haven’t been on a football field to get a comparative measurement.) I took Kao out of her kennel, we got to the road and slowly made our way up and down the west side of the driveway; when we got back, she took off into the woods on the other side, running parallel to the road. Her running energetically seemed like a pretty good sign, but apparently it wasn’t.
Someone else’s gravel driveway sits right at the edge of our property on the east side—sometimes when we’re on a walk, Kao will “wander” halfway across that driveway before I give her a little yell and she comes back. If she’s been running in the woods, she’s pretty good about running down the tree line and popping out in front of me. Today, she got out of the woods and walked to the opposite side of the driveway. I told her to come over, so she slowly made her way to the driveway, stuck her leg out and pulled it back like the gravel was a bunch of hot coals. She got closer towards the road, moved towards the driveway, pulled back and did that about three times before walking onto the road and basically staggering over to me.
A few moments later, she collapsed onto her side. Her hind legs started kicking as if I was giving her a really good tummy skritch. Her back arched one way, then the other. Her mouth was wide open and as she thrashed from side to side, streams of spit flew all over the road and my arm as I used it to support her head and neck. I stroked her side with my other hand and waited for it to end, which took less than a minute and forever at the same time.
I knelt on the road, still stroking her side, waiting and waiting and waiting for her to recover. Kao eventually sat up, but I kept my arm against her chest and held her close to me so she wouldn’t fall down. I knew she wasn’t okay because while we sat there, three people asked if they could help. A woman across the street asked if she could get anything, someone in a truck asked if I needed a ride home and a woman walking her dogs wanted to help as well. When Kao is in her usual playful state, she’s always in the mood to sniff other dogs’ butts—she didn’t try to pull away from my arm at all when they got close.
Finally, she was ready to stand up. Or at least she wanted to, because when she got to her feet and tried walking, her hind legs buckled three times before she finally stayed upright. After walking for a few steps, she was looking up at me, panting, bouncing up and down like a puppy… like nothing had happened. I brought her up to the house instead of straight back to her kennel—even though I’d be taking her for another walk in less than two hours, I wanted to make sure she’d have enough water to slurp up as soon as she got back to her water dish.
So now it’s over. That chapter, at least. In a couple minutes, I’ll get her little bottle of insulin out of the refrigerator, fill up a syringe with 15cc (instead of 13), then gather a tablet of phenobarbitol and her food and water. I’ll take her for another walk and she’ll be moving along like nothing ever happened because as far as she knows, nothing did happen. As for me… a couple times during her seizure, her wide-open eyes stared directly into mine and it looked like she was pleading with me to make it stop. It was a sight I never want to see again.
Will she have another seizure? Probably. Will I be able to do anything differently? No. Will I be stuck at home alone with no one to keep me company? Yep. And I think that’ll be the worst part. I’ll have to help Kao through another seizure and give her an increased dose of medication, but there’s nothing for me. No cure and no patch to make me feel better. I hope Mom and Dad get home soon…
