The bathtub model
Imagine your dog's brain as a bathtub.
Glutamate is the water flowing in through the faucet. It's the brain's main "go" signal — essential, but dangerous in excess. Too much glutamate means too much excitation, and an over-excited brain can seize.
There's a drain that's supposed to carry the excess away, converting that "go" signal into a calming "stop" signal called GABA. In a healthy brain, the drain keeps up with the faucet, and the water level never gets near the top.
But if the drain is partly blocked — if the brain can't convert the excess fast enough — the water rises. Slowly. Predictably. Until it reaches the overflow point at the top of the tub.
Why the schedule matters
This is the part that gave me hope with both Sarah and Koe. If a seizure were random electrical misfiring, it would strike at random. But theirs came on a predictable interval — consistent with a tub filling steadily to a threshold and releasing.
A schedule isn't chaos. A schedule points to a process. And a process has limiting factors you can identify and support.
What this means
The whole premise of the protocol is straightforward once you see the tub: help the brain clear the excess faster, raise the overflow point, and reduce how much is flowing in to begin with — coming at the problem from more than one direction at once.
How you do that — the specific nutrients, the active forms that actually reach the enzyme, the doses scaled to your dog's weight — is the heart of the ebook. The model above is the map. The ebook is the route.
The human side of this science — my daughter Sarah's full story, the testing, the doctors who confirmed the mechanism — is documented in real time at sarahs-grand-mal-story.com.