By the way: none of these pictures were posed. Puppies are just so cute all by themselves.
Journal: Birthday through week one...
"Breeding puppies is not for the faint of heart."
Tulia started stage 1 labor on Thursday the 15th of February, 2001. Twelve hours later her labor just stopped. A mad rush to the vet confirmed that her cervix was open and she should be in stage 2 labor. One shot of oxytocin to restart her labor failed. A quick diagnosis of primary uterine inertia was made and we were on the way to the operating room.
She came through the c-section just fine as did 4 of the 6 puppies. One was very small compared to the others and needed to be resuscitated. Another needed a little bit of work to convince her to breathe. All in all the mom and the puppies were doing better than the human mom who had been up all night waiting for puppies.
The small puppy had continuing problems sucking and was not holding his weight. A Sunday trip to the vet and we were tube feeding. Despite tube feeding he died at 4 am on Monday morning. Why does everything bad happen in the early morning? Many tears and wailing and we went on. The other puppies were gaining weight quite well as Tulia's milk came in.
Then Tulia began to slow down and be less attentive to washing the puppies. This was at first a bit of a relief as she had wanted to wash them to the point that they were having trouble nursing. Oops!
But she continued to slow down, and started coughing, again IN THE EARLY MORNING. Her temp began rising rapidly and she would not take any fluids. From prior experience with Fionna we were prepared and gave her 500cc of fluid under her skin, which brought her temp back down somewhat. We started injectable antibiotics and consulted with our vet at 8am that morning. He confirmed the diagnosis of pneumonia (probably from lying around all the time with the puppies) and started her on a different injectable antibiotic. No problem, except that the puppies were not supposed to nurse for 48 hours while the infection came under control. This time we were ready as Deborah had made a 5 am trip to our local 24-hour store and we had nursing equipment. Of course, the puppies were not interested in it! We spent a very scary and frustrating day and night learning how to cut the nipples to suit the puppies and how to hold them and convince them that this really was good stuff.
At the end of the first week, Tulia is recovering well and the puppies are both being bottle fed (4 times a day) and nursing (2 times a day) to minimize the amount of antibiotic they receive in her milk. Maybe next week the human parents can recover as well!?
