It was early one Saturday morning in October of 2006, I had been asleep for about five and a half hours when I woke suddenly and jumped out of bed. My husband, John asked what was wrong and I answered that I was going to be sick. He followed to see if he could help me.

As he entered the hall he saw me hit my knees in front of the bathtub. He said that he felt panic all of a sudden and started to run but the door had closed before he could get there. I had kicked the vanity when I fell, moving it from under the sink and blocking the door. I later learned that I had a seizure.

I am fifty years old and have never had a seizure in my life. This one lasted more than forty minutes and John told me later that he only had about eight inches of opening to reach in and help me during the four occasions that I stopped breathing. He was finally able to grab my arm and pull me around enough that I was no longer against the vanity. He got the door free and taking our hand held shower attachment he began to soak me with cold water.

I do not remember the hallway, let alone the bathroom. What I do remember is being in a bear hug and opening my eyes to see the terror on John's face. I remember asking him what was wrong as I began to slide out of his arms. When I finally came out of it I was on the couch in the living room. I was a mess. I had wet myself and vomited all over everything. John tells me that during the seizure itself I got stiff as marble, gritted my teeth and made this awful noise. "But the vomiting was the most violent thing I have ever seen" he stated.

I had several seizures after that. None of them lasted very long, some only a minute. I was weak all the time though. I just couldn't get over it. We had no insurance and it was several weeks before we were able to find the means of obtaining medical care. The doctor was at a loss. Several tests were run. The only thing they found was that I was suffering from pneumonia.

The last Monday of December that year my kitten had a seizure. She was sound asleep when it started. I lasted only a minute or two. It was then that I remembered Cloe and Tigger. Cloe was a cat that I had purchased for my daughter some twenty-two years earlier. She was a Russian Tortoise. My youngest granddaughter was allergic to her and she was brought to my home to live.

Cloe had been here for about three months when she had a heart attack. She had always been well cared for but at her age I was amazed that she survived it. A month went by and she seemed to be doing fine.

One morning I woke up to an odd tapping noise. I found Cloe in the kitchen having a horribly violent seizure. She had them throughout the day. She seized more than she didn't and we had her put to sleep that evening.

Not long before her heart attack a truck drove by our farmhouse at about forty miles an hour. They threw a kitten out the window. I did not think I would get the poor thing out from under my house where he had run to hide from my dogs. Actually, I worked at it most of the day and John got him out when he got home. When Tigger was about a year old we woke up in the night to find him running in circles on our bed.

This circling occurred every few nights for several weeks. The veterinarian gave us medicine for the odd seizures but they did not stop them. Like Cloe he began to seize one day and seized for hours with only a few minutes break here and there.

Three cats developing this illness, none of them related is just too much of a coincidence.

History of Illness

I have had asthma for as long as I can remember. I rarely had an attack however. I could work in the heat for hours on end, which I did almost daily, and never have an attack. They seemed to come on more often at dusk on a humid day. It was during the early fall of 2002 that I started having regular and severe asthma attacks.

By the end of October that y