Walter: The Dog Who Taught Me That Love Is Not Enough

By Alejandro — Founder of DogEpiMonitor

There are losses you never truly overcome. You simply learn to live with them, to carry them in a different way, and to transform them into something that makes sense. This is the story of Walter, my long-haired German Shepherd, and how his death led me to create something that I hope will change your life—as a guardian of a dog with epilepsy—the same way he changed mine.

Walter, the Bear from Ejea de los Caballeros

Walter was born in 2011 in Ejea de los Caballeros, a town in the province of Zaragoza, Spain. He was a distant relative of Thor de los Rubios, a champion in beauty, though Walter never needed a pedigree to win anyone over.

I saw him for the first time in a photo of the litter. I showed it to my wife and daughter, and the three of us fell in love instantly. The question was how to bring him to Madrid without a car. In the end, an acquaintance offered to help, and we drove to Ejea to pick him up. It wasn’t a trip; it was an expedition. And when we arrived and saw him in person, we realized we were bringing a bear home.

He was huge. Tall, very tall, with dark, thick fur and that long-haired German Shepherd posture that intimidates those who don’t know him, but five seconds later, he’d have his head in your lap. He won the hearts of all our neighbors in Móstoles, the place that saw him grow up and, years later, die.

He loved his ball, his chew toy, and rolling in every mud puddle he encountered—and when I say every puddle, I mean every single one. He had a monumental appetite. Sausages were his weakness: when the supermarket employee arrived with the groceries, Walter had already identified which bag was the right one before they even stepped through the door. My wife once gave him a sausage and told him to take it to me at the other end of the dining room. Walter, crying with excitement but obeying, crossed the living room and handed it to me with a delicacy that I still don’t understand how an animal of that size could possess.

A neighbor who was studying K9 training for the police loved playing with him. He told me that Walter, without any formal training, was as obedient as his service dog. Of course, he listened to him. He didn’t always listen to me. That was also Walter.

The Afternoon Everything Changed: The First Seizure

He was thirty months old when the nightmare began.

He had been down for about five days, lacking energy, and the vet told us it was likely something digestive and that we should follow a special diet. On the fifth day, my daughter and I were in the dining room. Walter went to the balcony alone, went rigid, and suddenly collapsed on his side.

And then the seizures started.

I didn’t know what was happening. My wife wasn’t home. My young daughter was just as desperate as I was. I tried to stay calm, to act as if it were a human emergency, and I made every mistake in the book: I held him down, I put my hand in his mouth so he wouldn’t bite his tongue, I talked to him as if he could hear me. But Walter wasn’t conscious of anything. He wasn’t there.

Two minutes. Two minutes that felt like an eternity.

When he came to, he left a puddle of drool on the floor, stood up disoriented, and started walking in circles around the apartment. It took time for him to recognize me. To be himself again. Never, in any of the crises that followed, did he ever hurt me. That was also Walter.

The next day we went to the vet. Jesús, an extraordinary human being, started the tests immediately. And from that day on, the seizures didn’t stop.

Living with Canine Epilepsy: The Ordeal No One Prepares You For

The first few weeks meant two seizures a day: one at dawn, one in the afternoon. Sometimes I was alone. Sometimes the family was there. It was always devastating.

As months passed, the treatments didn’t work. The seizures increased. He reached a point of having five in a single day. He wouldn’t take the pills anymore. The days became an ordeal for everyone: for Walter, for us, for the neighbors who loved him as their own.

Specialists from the Spanish army examined him and gave a devastating diagnosis: we had to put him to sleep. I refused. We refused. I had hope. He had to get better.

What I didn’t have—and this is something that haunts me to this day—were tools. I had nothing. Scattered notebooks. Photos on my cell phone with no order. Different medications at variable doses that I wrote down as best as I could. There was no way to see the pattern, to know if something was working, or to bring the vet a coherent record that would allow them to make better decisions. Everything was chaos. And in chaos, fear grows faster than any solution.

The hardest part was leaving him alone. Every time we left the house, it was an agony. What if he had a seizure with no one there? What if no one could help him?

The Ending That Still Hurts to Write

One Sunday, he had three back-to-back seizures in just a few minutes. When we arrived at the emergency vet, the vets looked at each other. I understood that silence.

Walter had lost his sight. He was paralyzed in all four legs. He was breathing with difficulty. The neurological damage was irreversible.

They offered to hospitalize him. But we already knew what that meant. And because Walter was mine—or rather, because he had adopted me—I had to make the worst decision of my life.

Walter died on June 1, 2014.

I am writing this in February 2026, and I still cry when I remember him. To this day, I haven’t fully recovered. I probably never will. But I learned to transform that pain into something that makes sense.

Eleven Years Later, a Promise

Shortly after losing Walter, life kept moving as it always does, even if one doesn’t want it to: my father-in-law fell ill, and my family decided to return to Argentina after fourteen years in Spain.

The years passed. The pain of Walter never went away. It settled, becoming denser, quieter, but always present.

Eleven months ago, during one of my darkest moments, it was my dog Frida—a beautiful German Shepherd, just like my little angel—who shook me from the inside. I saw myself in the mirror and said: I cannot go on like this. I have to do something productive with this pain.

And I thought of Walter. How alone I felt that night of the first seizure. The disorganized notebooks. Not knowing if the treatment was working. Having to reconstruct everything from memory every time I went to the vet. How much I would have given to have a tool to help me through all of that.

I started developing a simple program to record seizures in epileptic dogs. And when I finished, I wondered if something similar existed in the market.

It didn’t. Nothing. No tool designed specifically for guardians of dogs with epilepsy.

I looked for it in expert forums, in guardian communities, and on specialized pages. And I found something that broke my heart and at the same time gave me purpose: thousands of people asking for exactly that tool. Guardians just like me, alone in front of their notebooks, just as lost as I had been.

DogEpiMonitor Was Born: More Than an App for Canine Epilepsy

With everything I learned—what those guardians needed and what I would have needed in 2014—DogEpiMonitor was born.

It is not just a seizure log. It is a true support application for guardians of epileptic dogs. It records each episode with all the relevant data, analyzes patterns, and can help you anticipate when the next crisis might occur. It educates you on how to care for your dog at each stage. And with a single click, it generates detailed reports, organized chronologically, with medication and studies included, ready to take to your vet.

Because that is also important to say: DogEpiMonitor does not replace the vet. Quite the contrary, it empowers them. What used to take hours to reconstruct from memory is now in a clear, precise, and complete report.

But there is more. Because I know that this disease is not just suffered by the dog.

It is suffered by the guardian who cannot leave the house in peace. It is suffered by the family that organizes their entire life so the dog is never alone. It is suffered by the person who wakes up at dawn and watches to see if the dog’s chest is rising and falling.

That is why DogEpiMonitor also has a forum and a chat: a space where we guardians can meet, support each other, and not feel alone in this. And where specialized veterinarians from different countries participate actively, answer questions, and contribute their knowledge.

For Those Who Are Where I Once Was

If you have made it this far, it is because you have a dog with epilepsy. Or someone close to you does. Or because you are looking for answers in a moment where everything seems chaotic.

I understand you. I know exactly what you are feeling.

I cannot give anyone back their Walter. I cannot give myself back mine, either. But I can offer you what I did not have: a tool designed with the love and pain of someone who was exactly where you are.

That is DogEpiMonitor. The app that would have changed my story with Walter.

Does your dog have epilepsy? Try DogEpiMonitor for free and tell me how it helps you. Your story matters, too.