Now I Do Have Something Nice to Say...

Iris had a vet visit yesterday for bloodwork and while we were there I talked to the vet about her recent increase in seizure frequency. Once I know what schedule Iris is on, I can usually predict (within a few days) when she's going to cluster again. She's always been in the 3-5 weeks range. She was on an every 4 weeks schedule for the longest time. I thought we were making progress with acupuncture when she was going 5 weeks, but now we're back down to three. We've been on a three week schedule the last few cycles.

It seems like Iris is one of the dogs that acupuncture just isn't making a big difference for. Sigh. I was really hoping for a miracle cure. We've stopped acupuncture and I really haven't noticed much of a change without it. The vet feels that she should be going at least a month between seizures. If she's having clusters more than once a month, we should change something. Now we're left with increasing her meds.

The title of this post is that I have something nice to say, and I do! We got Iris' bloodwork results back today, and so far all of her liver values are normal! Did you just hear my sigh of relief? The vet prepared me yesterday by saying that he wouldn't be surprised if one of her levels (now I can't remember which one) was slightly high.  He'd consider slightly elevated to be "normal" for a dog on Pb. But, so far so good! We also checked Iris' Pb levels and right now she's in the low end of the normal range. Because her liver looks good and she's at the low end of the dosage range for her weight, we're going to try increasing her Pb dose from 30 mg twice a day to 45 mg twice a day. It's not the solution I was hoping for (and honestly, I'm not 100% certain it's the route I want to go yet).  But many dogs build up a tolerance to the meds over time and need their dosage increased. Maybe we're just at that point. We're going to check her Pb levels in a few weeks just to make sure we didn't increase it too much.

I'm also making some changes to her diet and supplements, which really deserves a separate post. Keeping fingers crossed that we start making some progress.