Sibersong Sleddogs - Adventures in Dog Mushing

September 2005
When we made plans to breed Kadee and Maja this summer, we had not anticipated that both girls would come into heat only days apart and wind up being bred at exactly the same time. But, ignorant fools that we were, we figured "So what if both litters are due on the same week? We'll manage to get some sleep in between them!"

Hah!

Although I had bred a litter before I had never actually whelped one. In another case of terrible timing, the first litter I bred was born while I was in Florida attending my brother's wedding - an event I did not wish to miss. In fact, the family still fondly remembers walking through Disney's Animal Kingdom while my cell phone rang every hour. "IT'S A RED BOY!" "IT'S A GRAY GIRL!" I'd scream across the throngs of people to my parents and siblings, while the rest of the park guests gave me odd looks.

And so we eagerly awaited the arrival of these two litters. The first litters of my own that I would get to actually whelp. Both of the Moms had been living in the house for the week prior to giving birth so that we could keep a close eye on them and watch for the start of their labors.

On Monday morning, September 5, we took the rest of the dogs out for an early season run. When we returned home I noticed that Kadee was pacing, kept asking to go outside, and instead of eating her dog cookie (a morning routine) she ignored it completely. Finally, the first signs! I called Kim & Kelly to tell them that I thought Kadee was starting her labor, and they told me that when she started panting very heavily the time would be drawing near.

By that night, Kadee still was not showing any signs of heavy panting. The restlessness and refusal to eat continued, but by 11 pm when her water had not broken and she still was not panting I fell asleep on the couch with the baby monitor beside me, assuming I had just read the signs wrong.

Around 3 am, I woke to the mewling sounds of a puppy on the monitor. I bolted off the couch and down the stairs to the garage, threw the light on over the whelping pen, and sure enough Kadee was cleaning off a puppy. I practically flew up the stairs and screamed for Derek to wake up. Then I grabbed the phone and ran back downstairs, calling Kim & Kelly at the same time. I was practically incoherent on the phone, "A puppy.... already born....black and white.... I think it's a boy.... no I'm not sure.... oh my god, can you guys come over? I don't know what I'm doing!"

My next call was to my sister-in-law, who had wanted to be there for the birth. "The first puppy was born! If you get in the car right now you can probably still see most of the litter being born!" (She lives 2 hours away)

Puppies number 2-6 were all born around an hour to two hours apart each. Most were born breech (feet first) and quite a few needed to be helped out of the birth canal. Kim and Kelly were wonderful; having done this so many times before they never panicked, always knew what to do, and taught me a lot that morning about whelping.

But unfortunately, it was a weekday, and both Kim and Kelly had to leave by 8 or 9 am to go off to their jobs. And of course, once the experts left the trouble began....

Around 10 am or so, Kadee expelled another gush of green liquid (don't ask me why it was green...I've no idea). Now normally after a gush of green she would have another contraction very quickly and a puppy would splat out. No I'm not kidding - they really did make a kind of SPLAATTT sound as they popped out.

But puppy number 7 didn't come squirting out as the 6 before him had. Kadee had a very mild contraction, but not enough to push the puppy very far. Minutes passed. No puppy. I started to get concerned. I put on a pair of surgical gloves and went on a puppy hunt. I could feel the puppy's head and the sac around it appeared to already have broken, but it was too far up the birth canal for me to grab on and try to tug it out. We took Kadee out of the whelping box and tried walking her around outside, but she didn't have any further contractions and the puppy didn't budge.

At least five minutes had passed, and I was starting to panic. As far as I know, once the sac is broken the puppy needs to breathe in order to stay alive. I got on the phone and called Kim at work, asking, "What do I do? What do I do?" She told me she'd come right over, but she was at least 10 minutes away. I feared the puppy wouldn't survive that long.

I knew I had to make a quick decision. Leaving my sister-in-law behind to watch the 6 pups already born, we grabbed Kadee, jumped in the truck, and headed for the nearest vet (who thankfully happens to only be 1 minute down the road). But just as we approached the end of our street another bit of liquid came shooting out of Kadee. I looked, and there was the head of the puppy emerging. I yelled, "Stop! Stop! It's coming!" Out popped the puppy into my lap, followed by another gush of disgusting green goo all over the truck. Kadee looked horrified at this undignified method of giving birth and hopped into the backseat of the truck to hide. As Derek turned the truck around to race back home I used my shirt to rub and clean off the puppy - and miraculously, he was alive and well!

We knew Kadee had at least one more puppy in her. About 2 hours passed before she finally started contractions again. By this time Derek had left to go to work and Kim had left to return to her job. It was down to just Dawn and myself.

Puppy number 8 popped out without any problems. But as soon as the puppy came out I suspected something wasn't right. Kadee cleaned up the afterbirth but ignored the puppy completely and the puppy wasn't moving. I picked it up and it sagged limply in my hands. I tried everything - rubbing it, cleaning out it's mouth - if I knew how to, I'd probably have tried CPR. But to no avail: the puppy was gone.

I know that stillborn pups are a fact of birth, and happen quite frequently. So I was a tiny bit bummed but not overly so. I had 7 healthy, beautiful puppies to be thankful for. And it appeared that Kadee was done for the day. Just to be sure, however, Dawn and I decided to stay in the whelping pen another few hours to keep an eye on her and the pups. And two hours later, Kadee expelled another stillborn puppy.

This time, I was deeply saddened by the loss. I could handle one stillborn pup but two seemed like such a waste, such a shame.

The ninth puppy was definately Kadee's last of that litter. The entire process took approximately 10 hours from the time the first pup was born to the time the last pup was born.

Litter #2
Meanwhile, earlier that morning while Kadee was still giving birth Maja went into labor. Unlike Kadee, she wasn't content to stay in her whelping pen by herself. She spent her time trying to rip the door open - and eventually succeeded in causing me to have to repair it. When I got tired of watching her attempt to destroy the kennel I decided to let her back into the house for awhile. Big mistake! I went in a half hour later to discover that she had built herself a nest...by tearing open my couch cushion and pulling out the stuffing! Aaargh!

We thought for sure Maja would give birth sometime that night. When Derek came home from work we took turns keeping her company in her whelping pen while the other person napped. Come the next morning, however, Maja's water still hadn't broken. Derek went off to work again and Kim came over to keep me company while we waited for something to happen. And waited. And waited. And waited....

I sent Kim home around 2 or 3 pm. Maja seemed content to just snuggle up to whomever was in the pen with her. I started to think that she was NEVER going to give birth because she liked the attention so much!

Around 5 pm I went outside to feed dogs. When I returned, I found Maja licking at a puddle on the whelping pen floor - FINALLY! I called the twins and let them know her water had broken around 5:30 pm.

Now usually it's around 1-2 hours after the water breaks that the first puppy was born. But not so with Maja. At 9 pm, we finally saw a head. Or now that I think about it, I believe it was an ass. And did the puppy want to come out easily? Of course not!

Whether it was because this was Maja's first litter and she was almost 6 years old, or whether she was just having problems, only 2 of the 6 puppies that were born came out easily. Puppy number one had to be pulled out of her because he was stuck. One and a half hours later, puppy number two came out smoothly, although Maja had reached down and broken the sac open before the puppy was fully out.

By now, we knew we were in for a loooong night! I came up with the idea of hooking up our spare TV and VCR just outside of the whelping pen so we could watch videos all night. We joked that next time around we were going to bring the couch down as well.

Two and half hours after the second puppy was born, Maja finally started having more contractions. A head poked out and Maja once again reached down and broke open the sac before we could stop her. But this time the puppy slid back up inside the birth canal instead of popping out. And then Maja stopped having any contractions.

We tried pulling the puppy out but it was too far up the canal to get a grip. We tried walking Maja, running Maja up and down the driveway. We tried massaging her uterus. We walked her again. We pleaded with her, which had about as much of an effect as yelling "Whoa" to a crazed and excited dogteam. Finally after 10 minutes of trying to get that puppy out we decided to resort to giving her a shot of Oxytocin to stimulate contractions.

At this point, however, I was pretty sure the puppy was going to be stillborn. The sac was broken, it had been 10 minutes already and would take another 10 minutes for the Oxytocin to be effective. After being up for 24 hours straight, witnessing a scary birth in Kadee's litter, and 2 stillborn pups, I felt unequipped to deal with any more dead puppies. With a sinking stomach I went upstairs to the kitchen while the others stayed with Maja, and I grabbed a Mike's Hard Lemonade to dull my frayed nerves.

I returned to the whelping pen in a haze of misery. I know that birthing litters always comes with risks, but why couldn't at least one of these first two whelpings I've done gone smoothly and complication-free? Lack of sleep on top of the myriad ups and downs of the past few days weren't helping me cope very well.

Finally the Oxytocin kicked in and Maja had a contraction strong enough to push the puppy out. I wasn't even watching - I was too convinced the puppy was already dead. But when Kelly yelled, "It's a girl and IT'S ALIVE!" my heart soared. The puppy had a little bit of liquid in her lungs, but Kelly swung her a few times between her legs (don't try this at home kids!) to get the water out and the puppy seemed perfectly fine.

But the fun wasn't over yet! An hour passed. Then two. Then three. Still, no signs of another puppy coming out. We knew Maja had at least one more in her, but she was showing no evidence of having any more contractions. At 6 am I finally called the vet, concerned that she was too exhausted from her long labor and that something was wrong. The vet assurred me that unless Maja seemed to be in distress that we should just let her be and the puppies would eventually come out.

Another forty-five minutes passed before the 4th puppy was finally born. It was now Thursday - Maja had first started to show signs of labor early Tuesday morning, almost 48 hours ago! And it had been over 12 hours since her water had first broken.

Kim and Kelly had gone home by now, exhausted from the long ordeal. Derek and I had tried to catch short naps during the night, taking turns keeping watch over Maja. We were starting to feel as though we lived in the whelping pens with Kadee and Maja.

We still suspected that Maja had one more puppy to go. But again, it was over 4 hours before she started contracting. Once more, as soon as the head appeared Maja reached down and broke open the sac before we could stop her. As had happened before, the puppy slipped back up into the birth canal and was too far up to grab and help out. And once again, Maja stopped having contractions.

We tried every trick we had learned in the past 48 hours of whelping madness. But this time I wasn't taking any chances, and when after only a few minutes Maja showed no signs of having any more contractions I gave her another shot of Oxytocin (it had been many hours since the first one). While we waited for the shot to take effect we continued to walk her up and down the driveway, massage her uterus, and I tried to keep putting my hand up to grab the puppy - or at least, in my mind, to let air get to the puppy so it could breathe.

Luckily it didn't take a full 10 minutes for the shot to work before Maja finally had a contraction and the puppy was born. By this time, Derek and I were feeling like quite the experts on whelping. We'd kept our cool and just did what needed to be done, and the puppy was born alive and safe. I wasn't sure whether to pat myself on the back or to just go have a shot of tequila.

It was now 11 am on Thursday. We were fairly certain that Maja was done... but look what happened when we thought Kadee was done? So to be on the safe side I spent the afternoon in a chair beside the whelping pen, watching tv and reading a book and keeping an eye on Maja. Maja curled up and went to sleep and all signs pointed to her being done with whelping pups.

At around 3:20 Derek came down into the garage and announced he was going to run to the dump before it closed. I nodded and went back to watching the videotape I had popped into the VCR. Derek glanced over into Maja's kennel and said, "Oh my god, is that a HEAD?"

I quickly looked and sure enough, another puppy head was poking out. Unbelievable! We both jumped into the pen and began assisting her with the whelping of puppy number 6. He needed a little pulling and coaxing to come out, but was born without too much difficulty.

And that was the end. Finally. Total labor prior to whelping: 36 hours. Total whelping time: 30 hours. Poor Maja was utterly exhausted...and so were we!

We spent the rest of the evening keeping an eye out in case Maja wasn't quite done. Or perhaps that's just what we told ourselves. Perhaps, after 2.5 days of living in the whelping pens, we just couldn't bring ourselves to leave. It felt incredibly odd to go back to living indoors, away from the mom's, away from the pups. Our world had shrunk down to a 6x6 chainlink area. We now knew how it felt to be kenneled. And we were loathe to leave.

Until the lure of the trail called....

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