This past fall, Tanner and I were on the hunt for the better part of four months steady. We put over 6000 miles on the pickup, chasing throughout prairie Canada and the Dakotas, gunning and retrieving birds with good friends, old and new. While we made some good memories, it’s scary to think how close we came to not doing so.

Everything went so well last fall that I got a little cocky. Still selfishly holding out hope that epilepsy wasn’t the answer, that somehow, mysteriously, the seizure problem had passed, I began to cut back on his meds (specifically the potassium bromide, being convinced that it was the phenobarb, if anything, that was working) even further. Bad idea. After being seizure-free for 13 months, he had one. So we’re back at those minimum med levels (a combination of phenobarb and potassium bromide) with which he regained function last spring.

Through the trauma of it all, Tanner is a changed dog. He’s not the arguably abnormal, all-absorbed working dog he once was. Today Tanner’s the happy-just-to-be-a-dog dog he never was. And that, after all, is a good thing.

Oh, he still loves to hunt, and he does it with his own signature flair. But where living to hunt was once his whole life; he now seems to love life as a whole, a lot more.

Could it be there’s a lesson in that for all of us?

Maybe.

All I know for sure is it’s one I’m proud to have learned from my “seizure dog.”

Pushing nine years as I write this, Tanner is beginning to show his natural age. The aging process is no doubt being expedited by the seizures, which (crossing my fingers) remain under control. For the most part he’s still the same joy to be with and to hunt with that he’s always been. And for that, we’re oh so thankful!

It’s still with nagging trepidation that we face each day. But we take those days, Tanner and I, and make the most of them.