My name is Kayla Alford. I am raising money for the Moore Family as their 3 year old Tripp has been diagnosed with Epilepsy on Monday. I have been best friends with Tripps mom for over 15 years! Now I will go into a bit of his story!

Tripp has had a few febrile seizure prior to the last event. The last one being January 1st on his birthday where he was diagnosed with RSV and had a seizure lasting over 7 minutes.

This past Sunday on January 11th Tripp and I were spending some time together while waiting on his mom to arrive while her and her oldest daughter hunted. He had an “episode” that scared me making me think maybe he was having a seizure. Shauna (mom) was there in SECONDS and we tried to brush it off but something didn’t sit right. We contacted our amazing pediatrician who answered ON A SUNDAY! She immediately said no take him to Cook Children’s Hospital. She believed he had a drop seizure.

We arrived to the hospital and within 45 minutes Tripp had one really large seizure and that started a nightmare of a night for everyone in his family! Around 50 seizures in a 12 hr period (they had to see activity on an EEG) before meds were finally given! This little boy was EXHAUSTED as were the rest of us.

The next morning the Neurologist team at Children’s informed Shauna and Colton that Trippy has generalized epilepsy and has continual medication to take daily plus emergency medication if a seizure is triggered.

Due to the fact that Colton works out of town over 1/2 the month, most of the at home time is alone with Shauna. As you can assume sleeping is minimal as any given movement in the night scares us all. Any funny breathing scares us all and unfortunately Shauna is going to be by herself quite a lot.

This is where the Alert Dog comes into play: some Alert K9s can detect a seizure up to 6 hrs before it happens. Can you imagine being able to sleep knowing that if he is coming onto an episode the dog will wake a parent or guardian up? WOW! We have done our research put in application for dog programs that would provide the dog at a discounted rate, this all takes 2-3 years to complete. Like everything else these things come with a price tag and we would prefer to get the dog sooner rather than later. We plan on doing some fundraising tournaments to help cover costs as well so the total in the fund request with hopefully go down but these dogs range anywhere from $40,000-$60,000. With that being said WHEN we reach our goal anything in excess of Tripps Alert Dog will either be going towards epilepsy research or purchasing a dog for another family with epilepsy! (We will provide receipts)

This whole process has been very hard to watch BUT let me be the first to say that GOD has shown up in every way possible and we all know HE will provide through all of this! God bless all of you that have read this far and thank you for your time!