Head Tremors

Last night very well could have been one of the scariest nights of my life.

 

It was 6pm and I making dinner.  Ben came home and as usual, the dogs were anxious to great him.  After saying hello, Salty slipped into our bedroom.  Typically, she's not allowed in there because we like to keep that room as off limits to fosters as "Oscar's space".  I went in the room to find Salty laying on the floor with her head shaking back and forth, uncontrollably.  I screamed for Ben and then took a quick video before calling the rescue's vet coordinator to decide if we should go to our local vet down the street or the emergency vet.



After briefly discussing what was happening, the vet coordinator explained that these are called head tremors, and they're fairly common in bulldogs.  They can be brought on by any number of circumstances, including stress (which makes sense considering during the past three weeks of her life everything has changed).  Essentially, there's a drastic drop in blood sugar and the dog's head starts to convulse.  Salty still was able to make eye contact and initially stopped a lit bit when we tried to coax and pet her.  There's not much that can be done to help the dog, other than feed it high sugar items.  Thus, Salty enjoyed some extra snacks on honey on bread bites last night.

 

Between 6 and 9pm, Salty had five head tremor attacks.  Their duration lasted between one minute to seven minutes.  She was her happy and perky self this morning.  We're praying that she'll be okay tonight and it was just a one-day stress fluke (perhaps having all of the attention over the weekend also induced the tremors).  If more occur, we'll schedule an appointment for the rescue's vet to do some tests.  We're hopeful this won't happen. We'll take your prayers and good thoughts for Salty!