Donate to help Cass adopt a service dog!

My name is Steph and Cass is one of my very best friends. Her birthday is coming up in April and I'm trying to raise money for probably the best, most important birthday gift she's ever wanted. A service dog named Fiddler that will help her stay safe during seizures.

For the last few years, Cass has been struggling with occasional seizures that her doctors have not found a diagnosis for. Sometimes she gets injured (the first one was THE WORST), but most times she is just incredibly shaken and left to worry about when and where and why the next one will happen. Her team of professionals still, after more than three years of seizures, have not found a reason for why the seizures are even happening. I am raising money to help her pay for a service dog that will help keep her safe so we can all worry a little bit less about her and she can feel safer just existing.

Cass's seizure story:

The first one, the WORST one, was on Valentine's Day, February 14th, 2019. I was driving to meet Cass and her dad and daughter out for a little V-Day brunch when I got a call from Ross (her dad) that they were on their way to the hospital because Cass had just had a seizure and had hit her head quite badly. It happened while she was at home, right in front of Brynn (her teenage daughter). Cass was standing in her kitchen talking with Brynn, started acting a little weird, and then went down. Brynn had to call 911 and an ambulance came to take Cass to the hospital. Cass remembers none of it. She hit her head HARD on a metal step stool, got very concussed, and stayed overnight in the hospital so they could run a bunch of tests, but no cause was found. She saw a neurologist and was offered meds but declined at that time. The knot she had on her head was SO BIG and it took a long time to heal. So did the whiplash and so did the concussion symptoms.

Three years passed before her second seizure! Cass and everyone close to her felt so confident that the first seizure was just a fluke and everything seemed to be fine. But almost three years to the day, Feb 11th, 2022 Cass had her 2nd seizure. Thankfully she was already in the hospital for a regular appointment, sitting in a comfy chair when it happened. An aura is a weird feeling some people get before a seizure that can act as an alert before you convulse, but it is part of the seizure as well. Cass knows now that her aura feels like a major “sinking” feeling. She did not feel an aura before this seizure and she didn’t injure herself. She made another appointment with a neurologist, but it was 3 months before she could see someone just to talk about medications. The result of that appointment was that there STILL was no diagnosis for why these seizures had happened!

Shortly after the second seizure, the third seizure happened on Feb 27th, 2022. She was with her dad in his truck on their way to go on a hike. Thankfully Cass was not driving. She felt the aura, but she didn’t know what it meant at that point. Cass was not injured and her dad took her to the ER. She was started on an anti-convulsion medication. AGAIN all tests came back normal. As you can imagine, this was getting scary and incredibly frustrating.

March 11th, 2022 she finally had her neuro appt. They thoroughly looked at all test results, but still, no identifiable cause was found. All they said was to continue taking her medication.

April 27th, 2022 she had a follow-up with neuro. They switched her to extended-release tablets to mitigate side effects.

Cass's 4th seizure was on April 29th at home. She was downstairs doing laundry, she felt the aura and tried to make it back to her bedroom to lie down and stay safe. She ended up with a couple of gnarly bruises, but no major injuries.

On June 6 she saw the neuro again, and they started her on a second seizure med.

Her 5th and 6th seizures happened over the next couple of months and she started tracking correlations to try to connect some dots as to why they were happening since no cause had been found. She start taking medication to stop ovulating, as many of her seizures were lining up with that window.

On August 15th she had another follow-up with neuro, but still no diagnosis, they just increased the dosages of both meds.

Cass almost made it to 6 months without a seizure, but then on Jan 28, 2023, her 7th seizure happened while she was out at a restaurant. She hit her face on the edge of a table but was not seriously injured.

As you can imagine, living with such uncertainty and zero answers as to what is going on is incredibly frustrating and super scary, for Cass and everyone who loves her. Not to mention how embarrassing it is to bounce your face off tables in public and have no recollection of any of it until the EMTs are waking you up on the restaurant floor. Cass lives alone most of the time and therefore has no way to get help if she would have a seizure that injured her badly enough.

She recently met with a wonderful person named Lisa who trains service dogs. She has trained alert dogs for diabetes, heart rhythm alerts, and other general medical alerts. These dogs support their owner by being around so they can have the confidence to move through more easily and safely.

After Cass and Lisa met a few times, Lisa picked out Fiddler, a one-year-old Giant Schnauzer, specifically for Cass. This is one of Lisa's great gifts, being able to pair dogs with their humans by intuitively understanding their personalities and needs.

Lisa is only charging Cass for the dog. All of the scent and nose training work she is donating, which amazingly she does for A LOT of the dogs she’s trained. This specific training can cost upwards of $10,000. This is an immensely generous gift and a true blessing, but $3000 is still a lot of money for someone who has been in and out of work because her seizures leave Cass feeling extremely exhausted and mentally out of it for days at a time after one of these seizures.

Seizure dogs can:

Keep their owners safe during a fall that results from a seizure.

Protect their human’s head from injury during a seizure.

Alert an emergency contact after a seizure.

And some can be trained to learn to smell the seizure and alert their human so they can get themselves safe and take emergency medication to possibly stop the seizure.

I am trying to raise enough money to pay for this dog for Cass. It would be such a gift to give her some safety and peace of mind. If we can raise more than the cost of the dog, any additional funds will be donated to Lisa for her amazing work and generosity. Thank you so so SO MUCH for helping with this gift!