Monday afternoon my boss and VP come into my office at 4:32 as I’m clicking down programs to leave for the day. And they sit and start in on this complicated issue. I finally packed up at 5:20 and left them in my office talking. I drive through an unusually, frustrating amount of traffic and get to Collin’s school a few minutes before 6pm (with 6pm being the pick-up deadline). And I go get Collin and it’s just he and one other boy and they’re looking out the window. So then I add a lot of mom guilt to my frustration.
We get home, go to open the door, and our maid had hand locked the garage door. And that’s when I dropped the first f-bomb in my son’s presence, much to the surprise (and I think secret delight) of my family, I was the first to introduce that classy word to him. Thankfully he didn’t immediately start repeating it! A locked door wouldn’t be a problem for a responsible adult, except that somehow neither Cas nor I have keys to our house. Not that it would have mattered if Cas had a key since he was in Florida at a work conference. So we’re locked out.
I head to find our very well-hidden spare key. So well hidden that the last two times we’ve locked ourselves out (when someone other than Cas or me hand locks one of our doors), we’ve been unable to find the spare. And as I search for it, I’m on the phone with my aunt Debbie who I would have sworn had a spare to our house but she’s quite sure she doesn’t. I start reviewing my options – break a window, drive 40+ miles in traffic over Collin’s dinnertime to our maid’s house to get hers. And I find the spare – hallelujah!
So we go inside, I grab a beer with dinner, and have a normal rest of the night. I go to bed thinking, what a day and in retrospect, a funny story to email my friends tomorrow.
[Three side notes: it is super rare for me to cuss. I'm the type that my co-workers apologize to when they cuss in front of me. Clearly need to continue to guard my mouth, especially in front of Collin, but it's quite ironic that I'm the one to use the first really bad word in front of Collin. Two - we have remedied the key situation thanks to my wonderful Aunt Debbie who made multiple copies for us. Three - while I felt bad for getting Collin so late from school, on the way home he was asking to go back to school, so it's not like he was crying waiting for his parents.]
Around 11pm I get into bed with the dogs, Bruno burrows under the covers, and I’m reading a little to wind down. And then suddenly Bruno gets out of the bed, shaking, falls to the floor in a seizure, foaming at the mouth. I’m screaming, Fergie is freaking out, Bruno is uncontrollable, and Collin is fast asleep. Thankfully it ends and I call Debbie, who rushes over so I can take Bruno to the emergency vet.
Poor Bruno couldn’t walk so I carry him to my car and we drive the 3 minutes. And he has another seizure in the back of my car and I’m telling him all the family members that love him, worried he’s dying in the back of my car but hurrying to the vet in case it’s something he ate that is poisoning him. I’m running red lights and carry him out – he couldn’t even stand up while I opened the door.
They take him back, get him on an IV to medicate him and stop the seizures, and I wait. They ask me if I give them permission to perform doggie CPR – for a cost of course – and I don’t know if that even works. Cas is on the phone reviewing our “how much money we’ll spend to save Bruno’s life” budget – which has doubled since we got him, but it’s not in the 5-figures range. At 1am they tell me to go home, that he’s stable, and they’ll call if anything major happens.
It takes me forever to stop shaking and calm down, and then they call at 5am to say he had another “grand mal” seizure but he’s stable again. After I hang up I start to think of questions, my brain wasn’t yet functioning. In the morning he's able to walk out of the emergency vet and we take him to my vet where he was fine all day. They send him home but leave in his IV stint in case he has another seizure Tuesday night.
Tuesday evening I'm getting Collin's bath started and I walk out to the living room to grab Collin. I see a dog saliva area on the floor and so I ask:
Erin: Collin, was Bruno shaking?
Collin: yes
Erin: Was Bruno lying on the floor shaking?
Collin: yes
Erin: Was Bruno standing up shaking?
Collin: yes
Two year olds are not the best eye witnesses! I guessed later that he had a little face seizure, not a full blown one while I was starting to fill the bathtub.
We get everyone to bed and then at midnight, Bruno has another big seizure. Debbie once again comes to the rescue, I go to the emergency clinic, and Bruno gets back on epileptic medicine. I get home at 2am, settle down, and then at 3am our power goes out and the alarm system beeps every 10 seconds to notify me that it is not working. At 5am our power comes back on, more beeping, but by then I can re-set the alarm and get 2 uninterrupted hours of sleep. I wake up and get the Bruno report from the clinic - that over night he had another seizure, but they're hoping with regular medicine, they'll get him stabilized.
As a recap, Cas was out of town when we found out I had an ectopic pregnancy, when Collin got a rock impaled in his forehead, and now when my dog was diagnosed with epilepsy. What a week!
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