Second Litter

My second litter was 2 weeks after my first litter... You will find that females kept together have what we call the dorm room affect and come into season at the same time... which is not great because you are stuck breeding multiple dogs sometimes at once ...which with Poms when you have breeding woes is not fun.

Normally when a girl starts into labor you may notice them shaking... ever so slightly.. mine tend to shake first... then they go into panting it's a rythmatic type panting not your normal I'm hot or run a muck type panting. Once they start panting then they should within about 6 hours start digging and rootn looking for a place to have pups.

Well my second girl Orca just put herself in a crate... didn't have any real signs just layed in the crate.. I need to run to the store with my then husband well by the time we got back she had whelped a pup.. it was clean and fine.. a boy... then 20 minutes later she had another one a girl... and an hour later she had the last one another girl. When your dog has puppies you should check them for deformaties well one of the girls had a cleft palate ( a hole in the top of their mouths which prevents the pup from getting a good suction on the nipple depending where the hole is or the milk just pouring out their nose instead of going into their stomach and they inhale it into their lungs causing pneumonia. So we euthanized the cleft palate girl.. when I checked on the pups again...the mom had gone back to chew the umbelical cord some more and got too close and ripped the boys stomach open (unfortuantely this can be common) so he needed stitching up.. as it happened my then husband was a veterinarian... so we just stitched him up on the spot... but the mother didn't like "things" on her baby so she chewed the stitches out... so we had to stitch him back up again.. and while we were doing it the mom was sitting next to us and whining and I swear it sounding like she was saying owie owie.. she was quite the "talking" Pom. and again she undid the sutures... so again we stitched him up and put tape around him so she couldn't undo him.. Thus we called him Zipper.. Poor Zip had no energy to nurse and couldn't even suck on a bottle.. so everyone encouraged me to tube feed him... Luckily I had a friend who had done this before and she came over and showed me how. But you had to becareful not to get the tube down into the lugs or you'd drown them... Oh my stars I was a freakn wreck every time I fed the little guy that I was going to kill him.. I was working at the time and luckily I had a wonderful boss that let me keep him in a crate under my desk and feed him... Working full time and hand feeding a puppy every two hours was exhausting.. especially tube feeding. I was still exhausted from my first litter... at 4 weeks the little guys wound developed gangrene.. he was just 4 oz... my ex did surgery on him to cut off the gangrene.. and we put him on antibiotics plus I found a doggie herbalist Marina of Natural Rearing and she suggested putting Oregano oil on it which prevented the gangrene.. so we did all that.. Little Zip was stable but wasn't growing a whole lot... his sister the mom took care of and was doing great. At 8 weeks Little Zip's belly was finally healed up and he weighed all of 6 oz.. and I was weaning him ... I came home for lunch and Annette (my sister) came over and I gave him a little piece of lunch meat ham the flat stuff well he choked on it... You have never seen two more freak'd out women in your life... at the time I lived in town and 2 blocks from a vet clinic I was in high heels so Annette ran Zip over to the vet clinic only to find out when she got their they too were at lunch and there was no staff their that could help... so I had to run Zip to another vet that my vet husband recommended... because his clinic was 1/2 hour away and Zip wouldn't have lasted that long.. so I thought... so I get him there and got lectured about weaning a 2 week old puppy.. of which they in the end apologized but here I was hysterical my pup I worked so hard to keep alive was croaking and they were lecturing me... anyways very long story short... it turned out Zip had mega esophogus a dip in his trachea which then caused him to swallow air into his stomach and his stomach torsioned . They tried putting a tube down his throat but the stomach twisted too much ... they got him stabalized enough for me to take him to my vet husbands clinic so I raced there.. my ex's partner at the time Dr. Keith Tate had some experience with torsion and he took needles through to the stomach cavatie and released the air to see if we could get the stomach back to normal.. in the end we had to euthanize Zip... Mega esophogus can be a hereditary problem but it can also be caused by trauma to the trachea (hence tube feeding) so after this experience I swore I would never tube feed a puppy and I never have. Sometimes mother nature knows best and I should have let him go in the begining but this is a decision we all have to learn to come to and is a personal choice. Zip had a sister a darling little girl we called Harmony. At 10 weeks Harmony started squating all the time and would just pee one drop... but she thought she had to go. she developed staph infection around her vulva because she was dripping urine... So my vet husband took her into the clinic and ran some tests on her... turned out she had a birth defect where one of her kidneys the tube from the kidney that connects to the bladder did not hook up and she was leaking urine... because she was just 14 oz she was not a canidate for reconstruction surgery the specialist didn't think she would make it through the surgery.. that was 6 hours long... It was interesting in that Veterinarians have a "code" between them they offer their service to each other at discount prices which was really fascinating.. So the only other option for Harmony was to remove her affected kidney and she would live with only one kidney. So my vet husband did this.. it was no doubt very nerve wrecking making sure he took the correct bad kidney out and not the good one!! But all went well and she survived. The only other alternative would have been euthansia as she would have developed severe staph and infections from the leaking urine as it was she had skin scald from it. The only problem I had with Harm was that no one told me I should have fed her a low protein diet as her high protein diet caused her teeth to rot out prematurely... She was toothless by 6 years old. But she is still alive today at 13 1/2 with just one kidney.

The only thing I had done with this litter is the flea product Advantage had JUST come out onto the market and the mom was 3 weeks along and I applied it to her... that is the only thing I can think of that would have caused 3 pups to have birth defects.. of course Advantage denied it would cause those problems when I contacted them.