What is worse than a 1:30AM zombie? A 4:30AM zombie. Amy started to hear a strange noise and went to find Sark. He was under Anthony's bedside table, claws dug into the carpet, foaming at the mouth a little and panting quite a bit like he was trying to regain his kitty composure. Due to the time of day and the zombie-ness, we decided to chalk these odd moments up to a fluke thing and planned to watch Sark closely the following day.
All that day, Sark was extra sweet around the house. Amy felt like he was showing her that he was doing fine and not to worry about him, almost thanking her for waking up with him twice to make sure he was alright and take care of him.
That night, 1:30AM, about 5 hours before we were getting up to go to the airport, Sark had another episode. This time we heard a commotion, flipped on a bunch of lights, jumped out of bed and found Sark on the floor of our bedroom convulsing in a full on seizure. We aren't doctors, but we were pretty sure we watched him seizing on the floor. So, before Amy realized he was dialing, Anthony was already on the phone calling our local emergency vet. Amy stayed home so we didn't have to wake Xander up before our trip in the middle of the night and Anthony took Sark to our kitty ER. After waiting at least an hour there, Amy got Anthony hooked up with another ER nearby and they were able to see Sark quicker. The first ER had a critical dog they were trying to save, so they really didn't have time to see Sark. The second ER was able to see him pretty quickly and we all decided that the best thing would be to keep Sark for monitoring while we were away, at least for the first day or two. Everyone we spoke with, Anthony in person and Amy on speakerphone at all times, said that cats rarely have seizures or epilepsy so whatever we saw was most likely not a seizure but something else. What? No one knows.
So, Anthony finally got home around 4:30AM, totally wired. Duh. So after talking for a while, Amy finally fell asleep and got about and hour and a half rest. Anthony was too wired and ultimately slept for about an hour before having to wake up to get ready for our flight. We contemplated just staying awake but decided we were too old for that - we needed a nap!
Sark ended up staying at the ER for the full week we were on vacation. We originally thought our good friends, the Fisks, would be able to bring him home for us at some point while we were away, but Sark continued to have seizures, violent ones, at least once a day the majority of the time we were away. We were getting phone calls at 5AM our time to give us updates on his seizures. It was rough. When we weren't getting updates we were trying to enjoy our vacation, but obviously felt pretty guilty that we had to up and leave Sark the way we did.
Once we got home we picked Sark up right away. From there, things have all been a blur. He was in and out of the vet for weeks, back to the ER a couple of times, tried different medication. He had IVs and shaved legs, all kinds of torture that kitty must have been through in the name of medical science. Once we started to establish his medication/treatment, he was really out of it as a side effect of the drug. Ultimately we feared that something much worse was going on than epilepsy so we decided to proceed with a kitty spinal tap and MRI. The best news we've gotten in all of this is that Sark does not have a brain tumor or something fatal - he's going to be a pain in our ass for a long time to come and we couldn't be more happy about that.
Right now we are trying to figure out why his white blood cell count is really high, but for all intents and purposes our vets (we have two now) are happy with his prognosis and his epilepsy diagnosis. We'll keep you posted if we figure anything else out. Below is a photo of him in between all of the stuff he's been through - so we have hope he'll be back to a version of his old self in the future.
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