One night when Alfie was just 13months old we were awakened by a terrible thrashing noise from his crate. I ran downstairs to find him rigidly paddling, frothing at the mouth and wailing. Other people who have witnessed their dogs having fits have all said the same thing - you never forget the terror of the first one.

Initially there was a diagnosis of wait and see because seizures can be caused by a whole manner of things. But after a few more weeks and a couple of additional "episodes" a batch of medical tests was run on poor Alf. Nothing sinister like a tumour was found so a diagnosis of Idiopathic Epilepsy was made. That was diagnosis number one.

In 2004 Alfie was put on Epiphen (phenobarbitol) 30mg three times a day. He then went a whole eight months without any trouble at all. FANTASTIC.

Suddenly in March 2005 he had a seizure out of the blue followed by several others over the following months. We kept taking him back to the vets and we kept putting up the Pheno and then added Potassium Bromide (1000mg) a day. The seizures kept coming.

Desperate, one day in September, I did yet another trawl of the web to see what I could find out about this horrid condition and then came a big blow of diagnosis number two. Alfie has refractory epilpesy also known as Pharmacoresistant Epilepsy. In other words a type that does not respond well to traditional treatments. This was a really devastating blow.

By this time Alfie was on a massive 480mg of Phenobarbitol plus the Potassium Bromide. He weighs 33kg so the amount per kilo was huge. These drugs have serious side effects to contend with so to me the situation seemed to be a nightmare.




Of course Alfie never knew he had epilepsy.