Seizure

"Love, practised long enough, becomes procedure. You don't stop feeling it. You just learn to use your hands while your chest is doing something else."

The laptop screen was the brightest thing in the room. I had pulled the curtain halfway across the window an hour ago because the angle of the winter sun had made the display hard to read, and now the study existed in a kind of soft half-light that suited the music I was working to — a Bach cello suite, one of the quieter ones, threading through my headphones at a volume low enough that I could still hear the house around me. The assignment was for Applied Animal Behaviour. It was due Friday. I had three days to finish it and I was on my second paragraph, which was the kind of arithmetic that usually bothered me more than it did this afternoon.

This afternoon I was slow and I was letting myself be slow. I had slept until ten. I had not set an alarm. I had made toast standing at the kitchen bench in bare feet and read Charles's note left on the fridge — you owe me — without quite working out what I owed him for. I had phoned the Haven at eleven. Rachel had answered. Mabel had held through the night. Rate down to one-twenty-four by six, down to one-ten by ten. Stephen had gone home for a few hours' sleep and was due back at noon. She's not through it, Rachel had said, in the flat honest voice she used for everything, but she's closer than she was. I had thanked her and hung up and stood in the living room for a moment with my mobile in my hand, registering the small unfamiliar texture of something having worked.

Then I had come back to my bedroom. Closed the door. Put on the music. Started the assignment.

My arm ached in the familiar low register that meant the morning's dressing change had settled and the new gauze was doing its job. Mum had done the change for me at breakfast, without being asked, her hands on my forearm with the careful attention I had watched her bring to vegetables and to orchids and to the small bodies of my siblings when we had scraped ourselves as children. She had not said much. She had not had to. The sight of the wound had pulled a quiet oh, Jerome out of her that I had pretended not to hear, and she had cleaned it and re-dressed it and told me to drink a glass of water before I sat at my desk, and I had drunk the water and disappeared.

Millie was at my feet. She had wedged herself under the desk between my knees and the small space heater I wasn't meant to leave running unsupervised, and she had been asleep down there for nearly two hours. Her flank rose and fell against my left calf in the slow rhythm of real sleep. Every so often her paws twitched in whatever dream she was having — the kind of twitch that meant she was herding something, or being chased, or doing in sleep the things a younger dog had done while awake.

I typed another sentence. Deleted half of it. Retyped.

Somewhere below me, in the kitchen or in the dining room — I could track Mum by the particular quality of the small sounds she made — Mum was moving glass jars around on a bench. I did not know what she was doing. I knew only that it was one of the tasks she had been doing on and off all morning: unpacking a pantry cupboard, wiping shelves, rearranging the jars in an order that would make sense only to her. She had been doing it since before I came out of my bedroom. She had been doing it with the particular absorbed intensity that I had learned, over the years, to recognise as her response to things she was not yet ready to talk about.

I typed another sentence.

The Bach shifted into the sarabande, which was the movement of that suite I loved most — slower, gentler, the kind of music that asked for breath rather than attention. I closed my eyes for a moment and let it move through me. When I opened them, the assignment was still there, and the cursor was still blinking, and the afternoon was still moving at the pace the afternoon had decided on.

Millie made a sound.

It was small. Small enough that if I had not known her, I would not have heard it at all. A high thin note from low in her throat, the kind of note that could have been a sigh in a sleeping dog, except that I knew Millie's sighs and this was not one of them.

I lifted one side of the headphones off my ear.

The second note came. Slightly louder. Still small. But with the particular catch at the end of it that I had learned to identify the way I had learned to identify the whistle on the back of Mabel's breath yesterday — the small audible signature of a thing going wrong.

I took the headphones off entirely and set them on the desk.

"Mills."

She did not respond. She was already not quite here. I had seen it happen dozens of times now and I still could not describe the moment accurately — the way the centre of her shifted from being in the room to being somewhere inaccessible, the way her presence thinned without her body moving. Her eyes opened, which was the next thing that always happened. Opened and did not track. Her front paws scraped once against the leg of my chair, not to stand, just a reflex, a small involuntary gesture.

I was already out of the chair.

My body moved faster than my thinking. It always did, with this. I had done this enough times that the sequence lived below conscious decision: push the chair back without scraping the floor, kneel, move the closest hard-edged objects out of the space around her — the heater, the small rubbish bin, the power cable of the laptop I had already reached across the desk to disconnect from the wall. The arm complained. I used my good hand for the harder things and my bad hand for the lighter things and did not let myself notice the difference except to work around it.

"I'm here. Mills. I'm here."

I said it because the shape of saying it mattered to me, not because she could hear it. She was past hearing me. Her eyes were open and not tracking, and a small line of drool had started at the corner of her mouth, and the full body tension was arriving the way it always arrived — the muscles along her back drawing tight, the legs going rigid, the whole small frame of her preparing for the thing that was about to happen to it.

I stayed in the space I had cleared. I did not touch her body, because touching her body during a seizure was the thing the vets had taught me in the first week never to do — you could hurt her, you could hurt yourself, you could confuse her post-ictal response. I kept one hand resting on the carpet beside her head, close but not on, so that when she came back into herself my scent and the small warmth of me would be the first things she registered.

Then the seizure came.

It took her the way it always took her. The generalised tonic phase first — her whole body locking, every muscle at full tension, her jaw clenched, her eyes rolled slightly back. Then the clonic phase — the rhythmic jerking, the legs paddling at nothing, the head thrown back and jerking against the rug in the stuttering beat that I knew would leave her exhausted. Drool came. More than before. I reached for the small towel I kept on the bottom shelf of the bookcase for exactly this purpose and laid it near her mouth without touching her.

I knelt there and watched my dog have her seizure.

There is nothing to say about this part that I have not said to myself dozens of times. You cannot help. You cannot shorten it. You cannot hold her. The thing that is happening to her is happening inside her, and your job is to keep the room safe and to be the first thing she sees when she comes back, and that is all. Every instinct in you wants to do more. Every instinct is wrong. The protocol is to wait.

I waited.

I counted, not because counting helped, but because counting was what my body did now with things it could not control. The count reached forty-two by the time the rhythm started to break up. Forty-six by the time the jerking softened. Fifty-one by the time her body released the last of the tension and she lay still on the rug, flank heaving, drool spreading in a small damp circle under her cheek, her eyes closed.

One minute fifty-one, give or take. Long. Longer than her usual. Not her longest, but well above her median.

I waited another thirty seconds before I moved. Then I reached for the towel and wiped her mouth carefully, slow strokes, keeping my hand visible so that if she opened her eyes she would see it coming. She did not open her eyes. I wiped her mouth a second time. Her breathing was still ragged but slowing. The tension had drained from her body in the way it always did after the storm — a kind of absolute heaviness, the body registering the metabolic cost.

"You're alright, Mills. You're alright."

I let my hand rest on her flank. Lightly. Just enough contact that she would feel me there without feeling pinned.

She was hot. The muscular work of a seizure generated a surprising amount of heat, and the fur between my fingers was damp at the roots. I moved my hand to her head, stroked between her ears with the flat of my fingers, and waited.

Minutes passed. I did not know how many. I had stopped counting when the seizure ended because counting was for the event, not the aftermath, and the aftermath had its own rhythm that did not respect arithmetic.

Her eyes opened.

They did not find me.

This was the part I was looking for, and this was the part that was wrong. Normally — and I had a solid sample size for what Millie's normal looked like — she came back within two or three minutes of the seizure ending. She would open her eyes, locate me, register me, register herself, and begin the slow disoriented process of reassembly. She might not stand for another five or ten minutes. She might not properly recognise the room for fifteen. But she would find me. The first act of her re-emerging consciousness would be to find me.

She did not find me.

Her eyes opened, and they moved across the space of the study, and they slid past my face without stopping. They kept moving. They went up the wall behind me, tracked the curtain rod without interest, drifted down the side of the bookcase. Nothing in the room held them. Nothing was familiar enough to hold them.

I kept my hand on her head. I kept my voice low.

"Mills. Mills. I'm here. It's me. It's Jerome."

Nothing. No flicker. No ear-tilt. Nothing that said she had heard a voice she knew.

She tried to stand.

She should not have tried to stand this soon. She was not ready. Her legs went under her wrong, and her back end slid, and she scrabbled against the rug for purchase and did not find it, and I had to use my bad arm to brace her because my good arm was already taking her head away from the leg of the desk. The arm hurt. I ignored it. She got her feet under her on the second attempt and stood up on legs that trembled through every joint.

She took a step.

Walked straight into the leg of the desk she had been sleeping under for two hours.

The impact was not hard. It was a slow unsteady step with no force behind it. But she stopped when she hit the desk, and she stood there with her nose against the wood, and she did not step back. She just stopped. As if she had lost the thread of what walking was for.

"Mills."

My voice sounded wrong in the room. Too high. I made myself bring it down.

"Mills. Come here. Come to me."

She did not come to me. She did not turn. She pressed her nose against the desk leg for another long moment and then, without recognising that an obstacle was there, tried to walk forward again. Her front paw ran into the wood. She stopped. Shifted slightly. Tried again.

I moved closer on my knees. Cupped my palm under her chin, gently, gently. Turned her head away from the desk so her body would follow.

She followed. But she followed in the way she would have followed if I had been a stranger doing the same thing — compliant, uncomprehending, with none of the small relaxation that Millie normally showed when I touched her.

She took three or four steps into the open space of the room. Then she stopped. Her head lowered. She stood there with her eyes open and her head down, panting, looking at nothing, and I watched her for a full minute while my chest did the thing my chest did and my hands stayed steady because my hands had to stay steady.

Long post-ictal. Very long. Non-recognition. Disorientation beyond anything I had seen her have before.

I was taking her to Dr Turner.

The decision did not feel like a decision. It felt like the next correct thing, the way clearing objects around her had been the next correct thing, the way wiping her mouth had been the next correct thing. I stood up. My knees protested. I rested my good hand on the desk for a second to let the blood come back into them, and then I walked to where her lead hung from the hook on the back of the door.

The lead had been a birthday present from Charles last year. A soft nylon webbing in a shade of green I had never quite liked but had continued using because Millie had grown used to the small friction sound it made when I lifted it off the hook. That sound was one of her cues. Ordinarily she came alive the second she heard it — head up, tail wagging, the entire room reorganising itself around the prospect of going outside.

I lifted the lead off the hook.

The sound happened. She did not respond to it.

I knelt down beside her, careful, slow, and clipped the lead to her collar with my good hand. She let me. She did not flinch, and she did not press into me, and she did not do any of the small affectionate things she ordinarily did when I clipped her on. She just stood there, head low, flanks still rising and falling faster than they should have been, letting me do what I needed to do without understanding why.

"I'm so sorry, Mills."

The words were out before I had decided to say them. I let them stand. I did not wipe my face, because my good hand was on her lead and my bad hand was on the doorframe for the stand-up, but I felt the heat behind my eyes and did not pretend I was not feeling it.

I opened the bedroom door. Led her out.

Mum was in the kitchen. She had moved from the pantry to the sink. I heard the water running before I reached the kitchen doorway, and by the time I did reach it she had closed the tap and was drying her hands on the tea towel over her shoulder. The jars on the bench behind her had been wiped and relabelled. A small pile of old labels sat in a dish beside the kettle.

She looked up when I came in, registered Millie on the lead in the same glance, and her face did the thing her face did when she stopped one kind of attention and started another.

"Oh, love. Again?"

"Long one. And the post's worse than usual. She's not recognising me."

Mum's hand stopped moving inside the tea towel. She looked at Millie properly. Millie stood in the middle of the kitchen floor on the lead, head low, not looking at anyone, not responding to her name when Mum said it gently.

"How long was it."

"Nearly two minutes."

She absorbed that. I saw her absorb it — the quiet calculation behind her eyes, the matching against whatever ledger she kept in the part of herself that kept ledgers. Mum was not a pet person. Mum had never pretended to be a pet person. But Millie had been in the house more than a year, and Mum had long since accepted her the way she accepted most things — with a slight air of putting up with it.

"Dr Turner," she said.

"Taking her now."

She nodded once. Then she said, the way she said things of this kind, without any particular expectation of how I would receive them: "I'll have the Sisters in the Ward pray for her."

On another day I might have felt what I had sometimes felt when she said things like this — the small friction of her faith arriving in a form I could not quite use. Today I did not feel that. Today I looked at my mother in her slightly too-warm kitchen cardigan with the tea towel over her shoulder and the small pile of pantry labels beside the kettle, and I saw a woman who had spent the morning working through her Monday disappointment in the only way she had available to her, and who was now offering me the only help she knew how to offer. The prayers were not nothing. The prayers were what she had. I had no right to want her to love in a language that was not hers.

"Thank you, Mum."

Something moved in her face. Not quite a smile. A softening.

"Do you want me to come with you? I can come with you."

"No. Stay. If Charles gets home, tell him where I am."

"I will. Take your phone. Ring me from the clinic."

"I will."

I crouched down beside Millie, slid one arm under her chest and the other under her hindquarters, and lifted her. My bad arm took the chest. It complained sharply. I ignored it. She was not heavy — twenty kilos, maybe, of exhausted Border Collie — but she was twenty kilos I was carrying one and a half-armed, and the distance from the kitchen to the car would be all that my body had to give for a while.

Mum opened the front door for me. Held it. Did not speak. Watched as I carried Millie across the front path and eased her down into the passenger seat of the Corolla, and watched as I arranged the blanket from the back seat around her to keep her warm and stop her from sliding when I took corners. She was still vague. Still not responding to the small cues that would ordinarily have occupied her. Her eyes closed before I had finished with the blanket.

I closed the passenger door. Walked around to the driver's side. Got in.

The key turned on the second try. The engine caught. The radio came on, mid-song — some ABC station that Mum had been listening to on her drive home from somewhere — and I switched it off before I had registered what it was playing.

Millie's breath fogged a small circle on the inside of the passenger window.

I put the car into reverse.