Amaising

I was in pretty bad shape when I dropped Maisie off at the emergency vet office. She'd never had a seizure that big before, and it had never taken her that long to pull out of it. Unfortunately, it got worse. That night, she had a total of 8 grand mal seizures. She couldn't get up, couldn't stop twitching, was severely anemic to the extent that words like "transfusion" were bandied about, and it was not looking good at all.

At about 11am on Monday, they gave her an enema of potassium bromide, which is an anti-seizure compound. This was in addition to the valium drip and the phenobarbitol shots. If this didn't work, the next step was to anesthetize her with pentobarbitol and hope that the seizures and tremors stopped when she came out of it.

I sat on the floor next to Maisie in the middle of the busy back office and talked to the vet. We discussed MRIs and spinal taps. We're pretty sure it's a brain tumor, or in VetSpeak, an intercranial mass. The options are treatment via brain surgery or treatment via medication. It was all a moot point if the seizures didn't stop. If the seizures did stop, we still had the problem of the red blood cell count. She's supposed to be between 43 and 59. She was at 28. So essentially, if she was going to survive, she'd have to dodge two bullets.

I drove home on Monday afternoon thinking that I'd lost her, that I'd have to go back that night and make the hard decision to put her to sleep. When there are so many things wrong, the question becomes one of quality of life. If she wasn't going to be able to stop the seizures without brain surgery, or if she couldn't start regenerating red blood cells, I was going to have to let her go.

I've always thought of myself as being very lucky. Sometimes I don't know how I manage to weasel my way through life, dodging bullets and falling pianos and broken mirrors. First of all, The Girl was incredibly helpful through this ordeal. I honestly think I might have broken if I hadn't had her to talk to, to prop me up.

Most importantly, though, Maisie managed to pull herself together. The anti-seizure medication worked. The seizures stopped, the tremors stopped, and a blood test showed that her blood cells were regenerating.

I brought her home yesterday. She's stumbling around drunkenly from the drugs, and she can't see out of her right eye, but she's here, she's wagging her tail, she's eating her dinner, and she's learning the limits of her new depth perception.

She's an inspiration to me. She could have given up. She could have died. She didn't. I've got her and she's got me. Isn't that how it's supposed to be?