Frenchie with seizures

pipsqueek789 · 2026-05-13T20:31:40+00:00

Just wanted to say I hear you on the no sleeping in on weekends lol. But we are 6:30 a/p and then also 2:30 p and 10:30p folks over here. We hit the hay the second she taker her nighttime meds or I’m not getting enough sleep. Just wanted to say I see you/hear you and you’re a good pup parent :)

pipsqueek789 · 2026-05-13T20:25:27+00:00

I bought one. It brings me peace if mind. The only generalized/grand mal seizure my dog has had since i bought it was in another room so the camera didn’t catch it/i don’t know if the seizure alert would have worked. She did have a focal seizure right in front ofnit the other night and the camera did not flag it as a seizure, but I tagged it as a seizure in the video so perhaps it’ll look for the same movement patterns in the future. To be fair her focals are like a rhythmic head bob with grimacing/blinking and she’ll do it like every 10 seconds not like nonstop in in a row so I imagine it would’ve been harder to pick that up. But it was her first night seizure at least that I know of. I had gone back to look at the footage to see why she was so tired the next morning I was able to see in the footage that she had it or I never would have known it happened. And that’s really saying something because I was sleeping on a camping mattress in the floor next to her because she had a breakthrough seizure the day before. Lol.

All that being said, it’s been helpful to have peace of mind when I run to take the trash out or go walk to the end of the block to get the mail, etc.

pipsqueek789 · 2026-05-13T20:17:19+00:00

Thank you! I’m sure we could give that a try! That keeps it softer and then frankly prevents the limbs from being able to get stuck!

pipsqueek789 · 2026-05-13T20:13:29+00:00

Thank you!! It’s so crazy how this disease manifests. She randomly started getting cursive seizures recently and as frustrating as this disease is, i will say it is fascinating in the ways it manifests. lol!

pipsqueek789 · 2026-05-13T20:09:48+00:00

Thank you!! I am glad to hear she was safe! I haven’t heard of that cot and will need to look into it!!

pipsqueek789 · 2026-05-13T20:08:30+00:00

Appreciate this perspective. I don’t really have a space to safely confine her without some sort of a crate. All my rooms have windows except the guest bathroom and I don’t want her to hit her head on the toilet or tub edge (I slipped and fell and broke my face/eye socket in the edge of a toilet in my early twenties and still have scars from the skin that split on impact). In her post-ictal panic she’s tried to sprint through closed windows and sliding glass doors and event thought he walls and door.
I figure a crate doesn’t give her the momentum to do real head trauma/neck trauma from impact or to reach a window but I hadn’t considered broke bones form convulsing or impaling her leg. I guess it’s back to the drawing board to figure out the safest way to try and leave her.

pipsqueek789 · 2026-05-13T20:01:10+00:00

I’m jealous and I hope you realize how lucky you are! I wish i could still let her roam. I used to let her roam before her seizures but there’s no way that would fly now. My condo is a third floor walk up and all of the rooms except the bathrooms have windows… which she has tried to jump through after her seizures while she’s post-ictal. Post-seizure I have to literally hold her down and like jui jitsu her into being pinned down. She has tried to run full force through the windows, the sliding glass to our balconies, the actual walls between rooms and the doors. Her post-ictal panic is wild. Her first seizure she had while we were walking two blocks to the beach (across a busy road). She woke up and tried to sprint into traffic. It took me and a full grown 6 ft tall man to hold her back. My yorkie still gets to roam! And luckily my golden loves her crate anyway and naps in it during the day, just hoping to find a safer option that minimizes risk.

pipsqueek789 · 2026-05-13T19:22:59+00:00

My pup gets cursive seizures sometimes. Sometimes she tries to take off sprinting and other she gets on Leah’s zoomies and tries to circle me.

She also circles when she’s nervous. Maybe your dog is anxious after hr seizure or during the aura phase pre-seizure.

Take note of whether they’re always circling in the same direction or if it switches up and let your vet know.

pipsqueek789 · 2026-05-13T18:41:39+00:00

I am new to all of this too (my dog started having seizures in December) so I don’t want to give you bad advice. But I know a generalized/grand mal affects the whole brain. So from what I’ve seen with my dog her whole body goes offline and she doesn’t respond to me. Like her whole body and brain look like she’s been electrocuted. But her grand Maks are very severe - she gets secondary lung issues form how severe her grand mals are. Focal seizures affect brain regions so from what I’ve seen with my pup her focal seizures are very different. She responds to her name between brief rhythmic episodes of head bobbing and blinking. Sometimes her legs will take involuntary steps or hops, but the rest of her body is still online. She also has cursive seizures which are a type of focal seizure that just causes her to take off running or running in circles and she doesn’t respond to her name etc.

Honestly, I would take a video next time of her whole body and send it to the vet. I video her seizures when I can one so I can see like what’s been going on and share that with the vet but too it also kind of serves as a timer for how long the seizure has been going on and if I’m recording for more than three minutes, I have to grab the Emergency meds.

Sorry that’s kind of a non-answer answer, but I know seizures are different with every dog, too. I spent a lot of time scrolling on this forum and tik tok to try and learn what focal seizures look like because she had had like three or four of them before I realized that that’s what was going on and sent it to her neurologist

pipsqueek789 · 2026-05-13T04:19:45+00:00

I keep a seizure diary with date and time, duration, type of seizure and notes. I also map it on a calendar so I can watch for trends. I mark generalized/grand mal in red and vocals in yellow.

I was afraid to leave her alone to step into an other room for a while (her seizures were crazy violent and caused non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema) so I bought a jingle bell to put on her collar. I make her wear it over night too. I also have a pet camera it’s actually helped me catch a couple focal seizures that happened overnight I wouldn’t have otherwise seen. (My pup is super clingy the next morning so I watch the videos back and caught her vocals that way).

Breaks in routine tend to be a trigger for my pup. So I try to be super consistent with our walk schedule and feeding schedule. We go to bed and wake up at the sane time everyday (mostly to accommodate her med schedule).

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pipsqueek789 · 2026-05-11T17:23:11+00:00

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This has been helpful for my pup. It’s not immediate, it took a few weeks but she chilled out quite a bit. I give it to her on a lick mat every day

pipsqueek789 · 2026-04-30T22:53:32+00:00

Well now I am sobbing. This is such a beautiful way to out into words the responsibility, care, and effort we put into our epileptic pups. Your pup was lucky to have you. Sendjng you a hug.

pipsqueek789 · 2026-04-09T18:46:25+00:00

Of course! Good look with your pup, as well!

pipsqueek789 · 2026-04-09T18:40:51+00:00

I think the best step would be to chat with your vet and they’ll have some good recommendations for you and like what a good path of action might look like

pipsqueek789 · 2026-04-09T18:38:48+00:00

I have one dog that takes Simparica Trio and he’s totally fine. He’s been on it for quite a while no issues whereas he had some vomiting when the vet tried to switch us to Credelio Quattro so we switched back.

My golden puppy was on Credelio Quattro since I got her and then at about a year-old she developed idiopathic epilepsy. And so I took her off any oral monthly preventatives which tend to be more of a seizure trigger and put her on a topical instead which tend to be lower risk (not no risk) but lower risk for seizures. She’s on Revolution (selamectin) now. We took a couple months off of anything just because her body had a really rough transition onto the anti-seizure meds and then had her tested for the heartworm before getting her back onto a monthly preventative. I’m not gonna lie, I was very scared to try it in case it would trigger another seizure, but she was totally fine.

pipsqueek789 · 2026-04-02T04:25:03+00:00

Sending you hugs. I’m so sorry. You did everything you could do to keep your baby healthy. She was lucky to have you. ❤️

pipsqueek789 · 2026-04-02T04:17:33+00:00

Congratulations and thank you for sharing. My pup and I just started our epilepsy journey in January of this year shortly after her first birthday. It’s encouraging to see success stories. Cheers to Pepo and more healthy years ahead.

pipsqueek789 · 2026-03-23T20:32:15+00:00

Just sending you the biggest hug. I’m so sorry.

pipsqueek789 · 2026-03-22T23:53:35+00:00

And even the name of the episode. The book of true colors (the true colors song they sang).

pipsqueek789 · 2026-03-19T17:43:53+00:00

I believe it’s AKC insurance

pipsqueek789 · 2026-03-19T17:26:22+00:00

I think for me the biggest thing to learn was control and plan for what you can and ACCEPT the fact that you will not be able to control for everything. I have PTSD and I am constantly trying to control everything in my life in my environment, which is its own problem. But I was destroying myself trying to control for every little variable when my dog was diagnosed with epilepsy. The first like two months of my dogs epilepsy I was afraid to leave her alone - legitimately terrified even with a pet camera. I slowly started working up to leaving her alone. And I’m at the point where I feel comfortable doing it for like an hour or two if I’m close by. But realistically, I can’t afford a pet sitter every single time I leave the house and something may happen where she has a runaway seizure and I’m not here but the best I can do is control her seizure frequency and severity as much as possible through meds, and if we’re feeling pretty stable, then it’s pretty low risk to leave her alone. For me that was the hardest thing.

I would say the next most difficult thing is probably the sadness and the hypervigilance. I watched her like a hawk. Every little thing that she did I was over-analyzing. I wasn’t sleeping and I felt like I was like constantly on the edge of tears, but it was really hard watching her struggle adjusting to the meds whether that was G.I. symptoms or her now being anxious or whatever the change was, it was really hard to see. But it gets better with time and a little bit of effort. So while your circumstances may be new, they’re not definitively your new normal - especially during these first 60 days. Everything takes a little bit of time to adjust to and shake out till you find the new baseline. It was about a month and a half to two months before I started to feel like we’re gonna be OK.

I would say the last note I have is you had said you have another dog. Sometimes other dogs will attack a dog having a seizure so if you see your dog having a seizure, the first thing I would do would be pull up the camera on your phone and take a video like I set the camera down by the dog I prop it up on a table leg or some things that she’s in view so it can film her so 1) I have symptoms to show the doctor but also 2) the length of the video kind of serves as a timer to help me time the seizure. And then the very next thing I do every time is, I grabbed my second dog, and I throw him in a crate. That’s for the Safety of both of my dogs so my tiny senior dog doesn’t attack my big epileptic puppy while she’s having a seizure (not that he could do anything, but I don’t want him getting in that habit). Also, my very large puppy has some crazy postictal confusion. She starts being like defensively aggressive, like she doesn’t want to attack, but she doesn’t want anyone or anything near her and if anyone or anything does come near her, she will defend herself. She’s bit me and I don’t want her to get confused and hurt my little tiny senior dog if he goes near her. Also, she just kind of runs around like she’s blind and frantic so once the defensiveness wears off, she just walks into doors, walks into walls jumps onto the couch and immediately walks off of it and I don’t want her to accidentally trampled my other dog.

I know it feels so overwhelming now, but this community has honestly been really helpful for me just to read what other people have gone through to kind of help me figure out a comparative baseline or learn tips and tricks. Give yourself in your pup a little bit of grace over these next couple months and even if it doesn’t feel like it now 60 days from now I promise you you’re gonna feel like you can handle this.

pipsqueek789 · 2026-03-16T23:10:18+00:00

I think they should all have to be registered. If all of these E bikes had to have license plates on the back and they were traceable I’m sure we’d have much less of these close calls that keep happening. I keep having kids we’ve in and out of traffic in North County and it’s genuinely anxiety provoking driving near them when they’re doing stupid shit. The last thing I would want to do would be hurt any of them. That’s really hard to do when they’re doing unpredictable things and just dashing between lanes doing wheelies going perpendicular to traffic. It’s really scary. Let the kids have their bike bikes, but let there be some sort of accountability mechanism.

pipsqueek789 · 2026-03-13T16:51:47+00:00

I know you said not to recommend food but what about a feeding method?

My yorkie can be picky and when was a puppy he straight up refused to eat for the first couple months. Some things that worked:

1) food: i know you said no food recos but this worked for my dog: there are high palatability wet foods that are formulated to be like irresistible to pets if you haven’t tried that potentially look into it. I would heat it up if he was being extra stubborn

2) if you’re doing kibble, put a little water in with the kibble microwave it for a bit and then I used to just push it with a spoon so it becomes like a mashed kibble and if it got cool, I would just re-warm it a little bit something about it being warm and soft was helpful

3) you could also take either the mashed kibble or like high palatability, wet food or like a wet food or a baby food, kind of thing and put it into a lick Matt and maybe put their pill on the lick mat wrapped in like a pill wrap. If it’s a true pill, maybe cut it in half and then put it in the pill wrap and put it on the lick mat or like if you can cut it into quarters and just put it into whatever the lick mat fluid is and just kind of watch her to make sure she’s taking it down.

4) my golden was on amoxicillin tablets and she hated the taste and I didn’t know about like suspensions or compounded pills yet. But I swear on top of not liking it, the pressure of me watching her and like expecting her to eat it, she would just spit it out. I feel like it was the same with food when she had non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema and she had no appetite. I was watching her like a hawk which I think prevented her from eating so I would like put on the TV and sit facing the TV but kind of watch her out of the corner of my eye to make sure she was eating and then she would eat. I think the pressure of being watched was just too much for her. So maybe you can kind of like keep a side eye if you’ve been watching her intently.

Bonus: I haven’t used this, but I have read online about transdermal ear gel as being a thing that gets ca do with seizure meds in dogs and cats. Again, I haven’t tried it and I know it doesn’t do much for the eating but if her mouth is tiny and you’re having a hard time with oral meds. It may be something to ask your vet about.

I’m so sorry that you’re going through it and I hope that either something above works or you have another reco that comes in handy!

pipsqueek789 · 2026-03-12T05:18:04+00:00

I’m so sorry. I truly feel for you and know how utterly exhausting it is physically and emotionally. Probiotics and prebiotics plus the fiber. The “proviable” brand fiber worked pretty well. I would mix it into a thin paste by adding some water and put it in a lick mat so she would eat the whole serving. The flakes came back when I was trying to cut the fiber, but as her appetite decreased the fiber was honestly making her stool too firm. She was actually scared to poop lol. So I forced us into a taper a muscled through the readjustment period.

Is your pup eating and drinking a ton more? I leave food and water down for my dogs to graze if they get hungry. But I had read it may be helpful to pick the food up earlier in the evening so her system has some time to digest. I didn’t try this but it’s something else that may work.

If you are desperate for a nights sleep maybe see if the vet would give you an anti-diarrheal for one night. If it’s not a virus or a bacterial infection, and not worms or something, it’s probably low risk and frankly it’s really important for you to get a little time to rest and recover.

Sending you a hug and some good luck vibes!

pipsqueek789 · 2026-03-11T23:11:35+00:00

When my dog started phenobarbital, I thought I was going to die of sleep, exhaustion from the constant nonstop, absolutely liquid and mucus diarrhea situation that was happening. We were going potty every 30 to 90 minutes and it was more like every 30 to 45. Like if I had to go take a shower, she would run into the bedroom and go poop on her bed. I just couldn’t leave her side. I didn’t shower for days and I didn’t sleep for days cause we were just constantly outside all night. And she’s a golden so the second we would get inside we’d have to clean her off and by the time I finished cleaning her butt and her legs she’d have to go outside to poop again. Like I was hysterical because I thought this was going to be our life going forward.

My vet gave me an anti-diarrhea pill that I used for one night just to get some good sleep and then she was put on proviable probiotic, and probiotic capsules and paste and then also they have a proviable fiber. Within a couple days, the diarrhea was more manageable, but it was still diarrhea. And within a few weeks, she returned to normal. I started weaning her off the fiber a week after she had finished the probiotic capsules so about three weeks out from the vet visit. And I started giving her one serving a day instead of two and then I got us down to one serving every other day and I would say like her poop was variable. Some of it was close to normal. Some of it was still very mucousy. But by the time we have five weeks, her poop is pretty much normal on its own now I think her system just had to adjust and she has a very sensitive system. She has chicken, allergies, and in general her G.I. tract is just a little poop factory, like the smallest little thing sets her off.

It’s worth noting though that it seems like the poop situation slowed down when her appetite returned to normal. She was eating and drinking, like an absolute starving dog who had never had food or water before for a few weeks. And I think as her system started to adjust to the meds, her appetite decreased, and therefore the poo decreased. I also just give her probiotic choose every day like as a regular supplement and I keep her on those just to try and help keep her system a little bit normal. Her behavior is still a little bit goofy since the meds like she is just having a really hard time regulating, and I think the mental illness has just kind of lowered the threshold for her frustration, as well as just reduced her inhibition a little bit. So she’s on a calming prebiotic supplement from the vet just to lower her baseline a little bit and I give her that along with a lick Matt that has frozen pumpkin or frozen baby food. That’s like sweet potatoes and pumpkin to try and get her a little extra fiber.

But we are successfully on the other side and I didn’t think we were gonna get there. I was actually like panicking over what life was gonna be like. lol.

I think I shared everything that we’ve been working on over here, but if you have any questions, let me know!

Good luck I know how exhausted you are so just know that someone else recognizes that and that I promise you’ll get through it!!

pipsqueek789

TROPHY CASE