Lottie is continuing to have night terrors. It is really kind of freaky, because when she gets scared, it is hard to get her awake. She will be lying on the bed with me and the cats, asleep, and suddenly she will growl, yelp, and lunge at a cat. She never seems to hurt them, but she has certainly scared the bejeebers out of them. She has lunged and bitten me a couple of times, but she doesn’t hurt. Bless her, she has very good bite inhibition, thankfully! But I’m still afraid she will hurt a cat, or one of the 
If she is sleeping on the floor away from any of us, she still growls and snaps, but at nothing. Sometimes she gets up and runs away, growling. One time she ran to a corner and stood snapping at the air, protecting herself from . . .? Additionally, since Noelle and Kannika passed away, Lottie has been going into bouts of OCD-like stress. This is nothing new, but it is more prevalent, and I’m not able to reach her and calm her down like I used to be able to do. She will be perfectly fine, then suddenly go into barking and digging at the floor, running and pouncing on nothing that I can see, and when I try to distract her or calm her, it is getting increasingly more difficult. I put a Thunder Shirt on her last week when it happened, and it seemed to help. She continued to go through her OCD behavior all evening, but it was for shorter periods with bouts of calm rest in-between. Thankfully, there have not been any more seizures (that I’m aware of) since the one and only one she had several months ago.
But all of this abnormal brain activity certainly has MY brain in overtime. What is going on? Is any of this related? Do other double merles have the same issues? Anecdotally, it seems this is true. But I don’t have any kind of statistics or studies to back up my theory. So if this is a part of the makeup of some, or many double merles, what is the cause? And what can we do?
I was listening to the radio last week, and heard about Charles Bonnet Syndrome. Odd, and interesting. Upon further research, I learned more about this strange syndrome. Basically, Charles Bonnet syndrome (CBS) in humans is a condition that causes patients with visual loss to have complex visual hallucinations. Sufferers, who are mentally healthy people with often significant visual loss, have vivid, complex recurrent visual hallucinations. One characteristic of these hallucinations is that they usually are "Lilliputian" (hallucinations in which the characters or objects are smaller than normal). The most common hallucination is of faces or cartoons. Sufferers understand that the hallucinations are not real, and the hallucinations are only visual, that is, they do not occur in any other senses, e.g. hearing, smell or taste. The main cause of CBS is loss of vision and how the brain reacts to this loss. The exact way loss of sight leads to hallucinations isn't really known, but research is slowly revealing more about how the eye and the brain work together. Current research seems to suggest that, when you are seeing real things around you, the information received from your eyes actually stops the brain from creating its own pictures. With vision loss, however, the brain is not receiving as much information from the eyes as it used to. The brain can sometimes fill in these gaps by releasing new fantasy pictures, patterns or old pictures that it has stored. When this occurs, these images stored in the brain are experienced as hallucinations. CBS tends to begin in the weeks and months following a deterioration in sight.
Not that I think Lottie has CBS, but it is interesting to learn that the brain can fill in visual images in the mind when there is a lack of true vision. Does this help explain what is happening with Lottie? I don’t know. Just lots to think about and contemplate about life with this little girl. It’s why I love her so.
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| Is this a scary "Lilliputian" hallucination, or is it real??? |
