Sirius just turned five! So many milestones have been marked with this guy in our lives… including his first seizure and following epilepsy diagnosis a little over a year ago. It’s been a challenging past year-plus for our family in balancing critical needs at home with full-time work demands and back-burner business focus, scheduling veterinary and specialist appointments (so many appointments), anxiety, overwhelm, sleepless night and intense fatigue, complicating social connections with family and friends, and navigating so many other unforeseen factors that can come with a chronic health diagnosis.
In January 2022 I was in a deep denial that this was the current and future reality for us and our exuberant, happy-go-lucky, playful pup. I was convinced that it was a fluke even after Sirius’s third seizure in less than a month. By March of last year, I had only started to reconcile my mindset when we were finally confronted with the reality that we needed to support his increasing seizure frequency with meds… and a huge shift in our routines to make sure he got those meds on time, every time.
My organizing part kicked into high-gear. If we were going to maintain any margin of control within a diagnosis that felt anything but controlled (and would not be for many months yet), it was going to require an overhaul in our daily lives and systems at home. When my organizing part can override my anxious/overwhelmed parts things are bound to feel a little more manageable. As organized as I have always been, I would have never thought I’d have a weekly pill organizer for my dog! But it’s now a staple fixture in a basket on our fridge, serving as a front-and-center secondary reminder to myriad daily alarms we have set on our phones to ensure the correct meds are dosed at the correct times. Tracking every seizure in minute detail also became an unconscious standard, with copious notes jotted down in the moment translated into a more comprehensive tracking system to share with our veterinary providers.
An incredible amount of our time and energy had been expended in making each next-right-decision on this continued path to Sirius’s healing and management of his seizures. We’ve learned to lean into our head/heart/gut checks for important information in the process, in addition to heavily researching all of our options at each phase. Most free moments have been spent learning more about epilepsy, treatment options, holistic and integrative veterinary care, and pet nutrition. Diet and meal routines changes were another overwhelming prospect when that came around in late-summer. After a slight tailspin, I was able to ground myself and find focus on the very next step, consulting the right people to get helpful advice and guidance as we transitioned Sirius from hydrolyzed protein kibble to a species appropriate diet. He went from refusing dinner to demanding his new delicious meals if I lost any slight track of the dinner hour! The joy and healing that he found in eating fresh, whole food has been profound. Despite my initial overwhelm, and the sure adjustment to find the right systems and routines, our mealtime routine actually brings me incredible joy now, too.
By the end of last year, Sirius’s seizures became increasingly better managed. However, as human caretakers our nervous systems were fried from the past year of near-weekly life interruptions, anxieties, and constant influx of information to process…all only as it pertained to Sirius’s health, let alone anything outside of his care. Very intentional steps went into helping us re-organize our human lives and return to basic self-care needs, including filling our own weekly pill organizers to help get back on track with healthy routines. As our “canary in the coal mine” Sirius has always been a barometer of high tension or stress, so it’s no surprise that Sirius’s overall health and seizure-threshold is significantly impacted by our stress. Since it’s simply not possible to hide any stress from him, steps in caring for ourselves also serve in caring for Sirius, and slowly but surely we are finding ourselves unwinding from a very tight spiral of overwhelm.
Despite the challenges, Sirius has helped reinforce numerous lessons including being mindful and present in our day to day lives, finding joy and connection, the importance of grounding ourselves in nature, eating foods that support and nourish our human and animal bodies, and finding external organizing systems and routines to help minimize the internal spinning in our heads. Taking tangible steps to control those things we can control allows us to find space to be present to those feelings and inevitable life instances that we cannot control.
Happy homes, happy humans… happy pets!
