Tanner, as a “seizure dog,” with two blues at a time. How sweet is that?!

Come Monday, and with Tanner acting every bit his old self, we were off to the vet where blood tests were the first order of business. When they came back negative in a few days, my young vet told me the one thing I really didn’t want to hear. “Though it’s far more common in dogs three and a half years and younger, we have to assume Tanner’s become a seizure dog.”The words cut like a knife. That the young doc added, “The good news is we can treat canine epilepsy pretty effectively,”was, at the time, of little comfort.

I just wasn’t ready to accept the diagnosis. I was in denial. “No way!”I thought, “Couldn’t be. Not my big time, well-accomplished gun dog, a veteran of six seasons of traveling with me up and down the flyways. (From the rice fields of Louisiana to the prairies of Canada, with stops everywhere in between, he was my constant and loyal companion.) Not my every-winter-day, game farm guide dog. Not my train-all-off season, master and HRC hunt-testing, often sought out for his style and reputation, stud dog.”

I’ll admit there was a sense of stigma to it all. It shouldn’t have been a factor. But I’d become (and remain) awful proud of Tanner. Labeling him a seizure dog was like letting the air out of my ego’s balloon.

Still, I knew we had a problem. And it had to be dealt with. So I had little choice but to go along with the vet’s suggestion that we put Tanner on a regimen of potassium bromide, the relatively newly-applied anti-convulsive I’m told today’s vet schools are teaching to be the first option in dealing with canine epilepsy. But it didn’t work. After five months Tanner was still having seizures--increasingly violent and lengthy ones at that--every 25 to 28 days.

I didn’t like the road we were on, or where it was headed. After explaining my feelings to him, my vet agreed to add phenobarbital to Tanner’s treatment. But the initial, obviously way-too-heavy dosage sent the dog into a dysfunctional never-never land.

The days were looking darker. With hunting season fast approaching I finally sought a second opinion. After weaning Tanner back off the phenobarb and getting him alert and operational once again, the new plan called for heavier dosages of potassium bromide. And that seemed to be working. But just before we were to head off to Alberta for the season’s first waterfowl hunt, Tanner endured yet another, though somewhat milder, episode. It was the type, the vet told me, “You just might have to learn to live with.”

“To hunt him or not?”was the question. One look in Tanner’s ever-hopeful eyes and the answer was obvious. Still scared as hell about where we were going with our problem, each hunt, every “just-one-more”adventure, would surely be that much more special. So we set out on a pretty ambitious schedule, though admittedly with a cloud of caution hanging over our heads. It was caution we’d throw to the wind as the situation demanded.

He was one of two Labs sharing the duty on the season’s first outing and he worked fine. I had no feel for the impact exertion would have on the seizures. But when the other dog came up lame before the afternoon duck shoot, the workload fell squarely on Tanner’s amply strong shoulders.