An Emergency C-Section!!!

01/16/03

Smart Cookie ate yesterday morning. Normally this means she would not go into labor within 6 hours or so, later she ate more, so we had it in our minds that we would take her in for a c-section this morning.

She wanted to go potty and while she was out I decided to change out her bed, it wasn't messed up or anything I just decided to change it. Well there it was "her cervix plug" slimy mucus mess. I called our Vet Clinic and asked the receptionist to ask one of the vets how soon afterward could she have her puppies, one of them said "anytime".

Bob had gone to Corinth with a shopping list. I took her temperature, 101, it had not dropped. I checked for milk, she didn't have any. Meanwhile I had Bob paged at Wal-Mart but he didn't answer. The receptionist had called Dr Frank on his cell phone, he called and left a message on the recorder (I was in the greenhouse) saying he would be back at the clinic at 5:30 and gave me his cell phone number in case we had an emergency. Bob got in at 5:40 I told him, it was her 62 day from the last time she was bred so we decided to go ahead since the forecast was for snow today.

I called Dr Frank and gave him the approximate time we would be there. We got to the clinic at 6:30PM. When Dr Frank checked her to see if she had started to dilate (surgical glove finger probe in the vagina to see if the cervix had started to open) she had a slight green discharge meaning the puppies were compromised and could die. He said it was an awfully good thing we hadn't waited. He hurriedly did a c-section and there was no damage to the puppies.

She had none of the classic signs of going into labor!!! Normally if a female looses her plug we are not likely to see it. We just got lucky, 4 puppies, 3 males & 1 female. I will have to give serious thought to this situation to insure this doesn't happen again. But after all this was her first litter and she didn't know the rules.

Judy