In Other News

Iris is back to herself after her seizures last weekend. She had 4 total, each about 5-10 min apart. Then the Valium kicked in and she was quite happy for the rest of the day. It had only been three weeks, but I think stress was a big factor this time.

On Saturday morning, they were testing the fire alarms in our building. Because they needed to enter the condo to test the alarms inside, we had to be home. And because we're in an end unit, we ended up being one of the last condos in the building checked. We had to listen to the fire alarms come on and off for a few hours. Iris was really freaked out by it, but she seemed to be doing ok staying next to me, and we were stuck in the building anyway. She had the seizures at 4 am on Sunday. Generally with seizures, anything in the last 30 hrs could be a trigger (except for vaccinces, which can be up to 45 days). The stress from the fire alarms definitely falls into the right time frame.

At least the fire alarm check only occurs once a year, and next year I'll know that Iris needs to spend the day somewhere else.

On an unrelated note, I have a couple of (potential) freelance jobs coming up, so I needed to quickly get my act together. One aspect was making a business card. Recognize the model?


I almost used the version with Iris lying on her back, but I thought it was a little harder to tell what she was doing in the small size. For the record, Iris is NOT allowed to sleep on the red futon. Her white fur really shows up on the red, so Iris is forced to sleep on the big fluffy white couch instead. If I fall asleep on the couch (which is more comfortable than the futon), the brat dog knows she can sneak onto the futon. As you can see, she clearly knows she doesn't belong on the futon and was very stressed out about the whole shoot. Yeah right. Who trained who?

Surf 'N Herd

It might be a publicity stunt, but it's still a great video. Here's an article about it: Ewe Won't Believe This. Iris says she's not herding anything in the water!

4:30 am

It's 4:30 am and I'm up with the seizure dog.  Sigh.  Maybe it is time to increase her meds.

Trouble Makers

Just a fun photo from when we visited my dad for Easter.


The three stooges all hoping for a handout. Notice that Henry Beagle is the one who ended up in the dog bed.

Color Changes

I'm playing around with some color changes. What do you think? I'm not quite decided on it yet. I wanted a warmer color because I think my photos will display better on that. Looking at it now, I think I chose colors that are too close to Iris' coat. Darn, I didn't even do that intentionally. I guess it means I like the color of my dog! But she isn't showing up quite the way I want. I think it's the main background color that needs to change. Also the heading photo will need to get updated to match everything else. Also, I think I can go in and change some of the template defaults via the html. Like those little green arrows in front of the links. I'll play with it more later.

Somehow while changing the colors I managed to delete all of my blog links. I have no idea how it happened. I'll have to go through and see if I can fix that as well.

EDIT: I think I've got the colors working better. I decided to try to keep the "red merle" look. Ha! Also got the blog list fixed too. Let me know if I missed you! I still want to change the heading photo, but I think I have an idea for that.

Newest Family Member

And now some good news! Introducing the newest family member, Galeru.


"Galeru" is a dragon or rainbow serpent from Australian mythology. Budgies are native to Australia, and I wanted to give him a larger-than-life name because budgies have such larger-than-life personalities.

Galeru came home on Friday and is starting to settle in. He's still pretty hand-shy, but he's gotten MUCH better since Friday (there has been a lot of millet bribery. I've yet to meet a budgie who doesn't love millet!) Once he settles in some more, I'm going to do some clicker training with him. I'd taught my last budgie to target, and he thought that was pretty fun. It should be pretty fun to see what this little guy can do.

Iris hasn't shown much interest in Galeru at all, which is good. We did do some LAT when I first brought him home. Iris was more interested in the cookies than the bird, which is a really good thing!

Running Out of Tricks

Last weekend was a bad seizure weekend. It had only been three weeks since Iris' last round of seizures. Damn it. She had 6 seizures total over a 21 hour period, so most of her seizures were spread pretty far apart. The post-ictal period (time following the actual seizure when the brain is still recovering, can last minutes or hours) was pretty long this time. Her last seizure was at about 4 am and she panted and paced for the next 4 hours straight. Pacing is a pretty typical post-ictal behavior for Iris. Also, she does a lot of sniffing of various objects around the house, acting like she's never seen them before. She doesn't always respond to basic commands, sometimes has trouble with her name, and occasionally forgets her housebreaking (I think she just forgets all of it because she's so confused and her mind is so foggy). Things that don't normally scare her will make her jump. Lately, her post-ictal period has been pretty short. This time, it was long. The first 4 hours were the worst with the constant pacing. She was much better after that, but I don't think she was really back to normal until Monday.

On Wednesday, we had an appointment with Dr C. He didn't like that she had so many seizures so soon. Unfortunately, he did say that we're starting to run out of tricks. Right now, Iris is on two medications (Keppra and Phenobarbital), a Chinese herb mix of Gastrodia and Uncaria, and goes for acupuncture every two weeks. None of it has significantly changed the time period between seizures. She's always been between 3-5 weeks. It seemed like the acupuncture was at least decreasing the number of seizures and shortening the post-ictal period when she would cluster. This last weekend it didn't seem to be the case. It feels like we get a brief "honeymoon period" with everything we try before we end up back at square zero.

We're trying one more thing. Dr C wants to try keeping magnets with a gold bead inside Iris' ears. It will constantly stimulate the acupuncture point there. They're a bit like a band-aid with a small, pointed magnet where the gauze should be.


Iris isn't bothered by them at all. They sit right inside and toward the front of her ears. Dr C showed me exactly where they go incase they fall out and sent me home some extra. I think the biggest problem will be keeping the fur clipped so the adhesive can stick to her skin. She already has some fuzz growing in.


Dr C told me if she does have a seizure, I can put a little pressure on the magnets during the seizure. It might help bring her around. If you look closely in the next photo, you can see the magnets inside her ears. They're barely noticeable.


We're keeping everything crossed that this helps. If it doesn't, we're starting to run out things to try. Dr C admitted that he doesn't have a lot of confidence in the magnets because we haven't seen dramatic improvement since starting acupuncture. It's still worth a shot. For now, we're still doing acupuncture every other week, but we'll see how she does between now and her next cluster. At least we're back to a more "normal" state for now.