Bittersweet Beginnings

That statement is deliberately not followed by an exclamation point. As any experienced dog breeder will tell you, whelping dogs is not always fun and games. This I knew. I was prepared for a weekend of little to no sleep, lots of grossness, and God only knows what. A vet examination showed that we were going to have seven, possibly eight puppies, and we were ecstatic over that news.

Our sweet Holly, who is a black Lab, is a breeder for New Horizons Service Dogs. As I mentioned last time, this was her first breeding and we were eagerly looking forward to having puppies. We took Holly up last week to the program director's house, since I had no experience whelping puppies. This turned out to be a very wise decision on our part.

Thursday, Janet called me to give me the heads-up that Holly was in the first stages of labor, confirmed by the use of WhelpWise, (http://www.whelpwise.com) a birth monitoring system akin to human fetal monitors. I planned to drive up the next day, the time depending on how Holly progressed.

My son and I drove up the next afternoon (a three-hour trip) and by midnight Friday night still had no puppies. This was unsettling, but not terribly so. We used a Doppler system to hear and check puppy heartbeats, just like they use for human babies, and we were monitoring Holly with the WhelpWise system every couple of hours.

Early in the morning it was decided that we should administer oxytocin and calcium to help her since she wasn't progressing as well as she should. The next morning when we still had no eminent signs of puppies, the decision was made to have a c-section performed. The vet, two hours away, was a specialist in reproductive medicine.

On the way there, Holly delivered her first puppy. Unfortunately, it was stillborn. We continued to the vet's office. Janet did her best to help keep my spirits up because we kept my son (who is only six) in the dark about what was going on in regards to the dead puppy. (Janet and I were running on pure adrenaline by now, neither one of us having any sleep in the prior thirty-six hours.) Lack of sleep and a very trying and emotional experience for me took its toll and I had difficulty staying composed.

The vet delivered four beautiful, healthy girl puppies. Three yellows and a black. Two more were dead in utero. It turns out that all seven puppies had been located in one "horn" (or side) of Holly's uterus. An unusual but not unheard of event. Combined with it being her first litter, it caused problems for Holly. We'd noticed she wasn't really trying to push and the vet said that the position of the puppies probably contributed to that. Bottom line being that we did all we could correctly and nothing we could have done probably would have saved the three we lost.

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