In May, on the day before the she was due to fly out, I found a brown smear on the sheet we used to cover the blanket on the bed. With impeccable timing, Breeze had finally decided to give in to nature. Once there—with Breeze wearing her seasonal panties—Dawn observed the dogs quietly from the sidelines and came up with her choice: GRCH Cranbrooke’s Back to the Future, “Mikey,” a dog who lived in Canada.
I had my reservations about him, despite his great win record and offspring who had also done very well. One of my main concerns was that he was too colorful, but Dawn was more focused on top line and croup. Though Breeze’s were good, they could be improved on. So I relented, and Mikey was the lucky boy.
On the eighth day of her estrus cycle, which happily fell on the last day of the classes, we dispatched Breeze with Mikey—in his very own motor home—up to Ontario, to the home of Doug and Linda Taylor. Dawn waved good-bye to Breeze as they all drove away in the RV, while I, back at home due to my book’s publication events, had my own misgivings. It was not easy to send my baby girl off with people I had never met, all in the name of a litter of puppies.
The Taylors treated Breeze as if she were a patient in the fat cats’ wing of the hospital. She was ensconced in her very own private room, on her very own overstuffed armchair, looking out her very own window at the comings and going of the other dogs. The Taylors had a three-acre lot, but she couldn’t run free because of her “condition.” She was walked hourly—better than she got at home—and was, in general, treated like a queen.
On the first day that they attempted a breeding, Breeze had no interest and took off, anything to get away from Mikey—even though he thought she smelled pretty good. But on the second day, she stood up proud and ready and flagged her tail to the side, indicating that she would stand and make it easier for him. The tie lasted half an hour, and when she got tired, she tried to lie down, but Doug caught her and sat her across his lap, where she promptly fell asleep. So much for my concern that, as a “maiden bitch,” she would be resistant.
On the third day (two days apart is generally considered the appropriate timing for an optimal breeding), Breeze was more than ready, and they were joined rump to rump in a matter of minutes.
A week after she left on the Taylors’ RV, she arrived at the San Francisco airport. Dawn and I went down to pick her up at United Airlines cargo; after a five-hour flight, she was waiting there in her kennel, scratching hard at the door to be let out.
Brad and I watched her daily, wondering whether we were imagining the symptoms, whether we could trust Mother Nature, or a dog.
“Are there puppies inside? Is anything growing in there at all?” we asked each other.
Gestation is sixty-three days long in a dog, and we couldn’t get an ultrasound to see whether or not any embryos had settled inside the horns of the uterus until the twenty-fifth day or so. We were nervous and eager. Breeze played hide-and-seek in a dark closet, experimenting with nesting perhaps, or else just teasing us. We began to hope.
In the excessive fashion so typical of me, I quickly ordered four books on canine pregnancy and on how to whelp a litter. Brad said it was probably like riding a bike, but I ignored him, and, reading avidly, I did learn things I’d never heard before or had indeed forgotten: the books said that wet and sloppy kisses spelled pregnancy, especially from a girl who had held herself just a little bit aloof from me. So, too, the way her nipples were rapidly becoming more swollen and prominent. And then there was something that looked to be morning sickness, as she rejected all food.
However, each of these signs was so subtle and subjective—and I also knew there was the very real possibility that she was having a “false” pregnancy (not uncommon in dogs), and that all these symptoms might be signs of nothing. Daisy had once swelled up as if she were full of pups and then endured a labor that lasted for hours and produced nothing. My father had taken her to the vet, where a standard X-ray revealed no puppies.
The day for the ultrasound arrived along with a lot of anxiety on my part. Dawn and I took Breeze to Dr. Cain, even though it was a fairly long drive across the bay to San Ramon. It seemed a wise idea to have the best doctor available when determining whether or not there were puppies by sonogram: an expert at reading the grainy gray screen could actually give you a puppy head count. So here I was again, my heart loud in my chest—but this time not for my own pregnancy.
The room was dark, and Breeze lay in a padded cradle on her back, gel on her pink belly, me restraining her head. The screen lit up with strange black, white, and gray shadows that I couldn’t interpret. And then Dr. Cain said, “Here are two her body has resorbed. The sacks are empty.”
My palms started to sweat.
And then she moved on. “But here are two more, these have heartbeats.”
I kissed Breeze’s nose from where I stood, holding her head, grinning down at her. And then there were two more heartbeats and then another and then another: six viable fetuses. Even Dawn had a smile on her face. Dr. Cain made a quick calculation with her calendar: Breeze was due on July the fourth. We were going to have a litter of fireworks puppies!
•••
PART VIII
we wait
{IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE}
Breeze . . .
and six pups
eighteen
BRAD AND I BEGAN to watch Breeze in earnest, and I reported each development to Dawn, to Michele, and to Myrna as well. Just like any pregnant woman, Breeze threw up her breakfast. When she stopped doing that, she began to act as if we hadn’t fed her in a month. She mooned around the counter-tops and dinner table, looking for freebees. I didn’t want her to get fat, so I resisted her increasingly affectionate ways. If she’d been cute before, now she was even cuter.
About every fifth day, Brad and I positioned her with her silhouette outlined against the pale blue wall in the dining room. We were as obsessed as the parents-to-be who keep taking pictures of the wife’s increasingly distended stomach. We put the photos up on the computer and ran them like a slide show, and soon the distinction between before and after was unmistakable. She didn’t have a belly button to measure by, but one of the spots on her lower left flank stretched bigger and bigger and bigger. Her teats were getting ready for milk and hung down pendulously. She began to look like a small cow—big body, small head.
Even before Breeze began to nest in earnest, I did. I ordered the biggest-size whelping box, complete with a large weaning pen, and when Breeze tried it on for size after it had arrived, she looked like a peanut against the side where she had curled. Brad looked at me dubiously. It was obviously made for a larger-size breed—like a Newfoundland—and Breeze could hardly get over the side to jump in. I made Brad saw the opening down so that she wouldn’t scrape her belly.
I unearthed an antique and unreliable scale (soon to be replaced by the kitchen digital) and found an old plastic pencil case full of hemostat clamps, leftover rickrack, old K-Y jelly, and surgical gloves. I threw most of the old out and bought new. Not because I needed to, but because it seemed right that Breeze should have the best.
From the backyard storage shed, I pulled out a big cardboard box marked “Puppy Supplies.” As I unpacked it, I realized that the handwriting on the side was Pat’s, running slightly downhill, but bold and unmistakable in any case. I stopped and stood in silence for a moment, remembering the litter we had raised together and all the good times we had. I thought of her often but perhaps missed her even more at a time like this. She would have been so excited about Breeze’s pregnancy. We would have been shopping for all this together.
And of course, thinking of Pat brought me back full circle to thinking of Myrna, and I felt my fear and worry return once again. Myrna and I were talking on the phone every night, and despite her “chin up” attitude, it was clear to me how quickly her symptoms were worsening. She listed them over and over: the fevers and the chills, the weakness, the pain in her side—as if talking about all this in detail would give her cont
rol over the cancer. In turn, I pushed away my own fear for her and regaled her with tales of my crazy shopping list for Breeze, hoping to distract her. She did laugh and counseled prudence—advice I ignored.
I wasn’t leaving anything to chance, any more than a newly pregnant couple would have waited to buy their crib or changing table until the week before the scheduled arrival of their darling. And so, at Costco, I selected a huge pack of white towels that I then bleached two times, rinsed three, and folded and stacked in a wicker basket. A set of sheepskin rugs and special puppy pee pads arrived from Canada, along with a newfangled ceramic warming lamp to replace the old red heat lamp, a kind that had fallen into disfavor since Ashley’s litter due to its flammable qualities. I bought clean brown paper at U-Haul to go under Breeze as she delivered, so that I could pull the sheets off as they got messy, like tablecloths in a restaurant.
We needed a warming box to hold the puppies and to keep their temperature stable while Breeze was occupied with delivering another pup, or if we had to make an emergency jump to the vet midway through her labor. Target had it—a shallow plastic storage box—along with the soft hand towels I would use to line it. I used a photo in my enormous emergency book on whelping premature puppies as a guide to the optimal size. I drew the line, however, at an oxygen tank for premies, when I learned it would cost over $400.
Little by little, I was remembering what to assemble, what I would need, all the while reading the whelping books that helped me see what I would have to do once again. More stuff: forceps to crush the umbilical cords, which seemed a better alternative to dental floss. Surgical scissors to cut them. A heating pad for the warming box, and a hot-water bottle, too, because I wasn’t sure which would work better. A bulb syringe to suction the babies’ noses and mouths from the liquid and mucus that could fill their lungs as they came down the birth canal. Big black trash bags. Paper, pen, clipboard, and charts designed by Brad, to record the time and order of whelping, the weights of the babies, and any other notes we wanted to make.
At the pharmacy, I filled my shopping basket with Betadine, rubbing alcohol, hand sanitizer, and a rectal thermometer. At the sewing supply store, I chose rickrack in six bright colors to adorn their necks so that we could tell who was who. A feeding tube, just in case Breeze’s milk was insufficient, and a can of special goat’s milk formula that I drove to four stores to find. On and on it went, the costs mounting. I was preparing as if I were the one going to have the babies. And this was my layette: the crib, the swaddling clothes, the receiving blankets, and the onesies.
•••
A month before Breeze was due to deliver, I hired a doggie “midwife” service. WhelpWise would be there to guide me through the delivery—after all, it had been ten years since my last litter, and twenty-eight years since my last baby. As I spoke to the owner, Karen, over the phone, she went through the process with me in detail. She wanted me to understand, precisely, the way her midwives worked to help their clients deliver healthy litters. Her expertise was apparent. She had been an obstetrical nurse in the operating rooms of several large hospitals—the human sort—before beginning her own practice with canines. All the staff at WhelpWise were professionals skilled at helping dogs to whelp successfully not only through normal deliveries, but particularly through those that ranged from difficult to emergency situations. After spending two hours on the phone with Karen, I knew I would be in good hands, and Dr. Cain had personally recommended her the day of our ultrasound.
All these preparations were new ways, to me, to ensure a smooth delivery that came with healthy, kicky pups. I was certain that WhelpWise would prove invaluable, especially if Breeze’s labor slowed or stopped and we had to have an emergency C-section.
Three weeks from the due date Karen and I had calculated, I phoned to let her know that Breeze and I were getting close to being ready to start practicing with necessary equipment. Through the postal service, she sent a giant cardboard box filled with an assortment of confusing machines and pieces and electric cords: a round flat sensor that attached to a small recorder that attached to a base unit the size of the old hard drive that my computer used back in the eighties. All of it to measure her uterine contractions. The sensor plugged into a gadget that interpreted the data and sent it via a modem line to their base station so that it could all be interpreted. The equipment would tell us if Breeze’s contractions were growing weaker during labor, a sign she was tiring, or approaching uterine inertia.
A Cesarean section, if done in time, might rectify any of these problems—hopefully, before either a puppy or Breeze died. I didn’t want to think about death any more than I already was with Myrna, and so I blocked such possibilities from my mind and just focused on how all this equipment and advice would provide invaluable assistance. I was feeling a little nervous about this whelping—as the years had passed, it seemed as if I had become even more of an inveterate worrier. This time the way I handled that was to begin practicing, which, as it developed, was not at all easy.
I sat down and went through all the directions impatiently, and then had to start over, more carefully. There was a fetal monitor, a Doppler that would amplify the pups’ heartbeats and let us know if one in particular needed immediate help because its heartbeat was either slowing or hastening beyond the normal limits. However, it was the unexplained, mysterious sheaf of papers that had black-and-white diagrams of a dog’s belly with numbers written on them that stumped me. It reminded me of the connect-the-dots game I had done as a child, only it turned out to be a lot more complicated.
Dr. Cain’s office was too far away and open only nine to six, if there were any kind of emergency during delivery. So Dawn and I escorted Breeze to our local neighborhood vet together. We felt he was quite competent, and the office was staffed twenty-four hours a day. An emergency Cesarean section in the middle of the night was something they ought to be able to handle, or so we hoped. At this appointment, it was time to do an X-ray that would give us a final headcount, because by now, the bones of the babies should be visible, from skull to tail. In the case of uterine inertia, when the puppies stop descending from the uterus, knowing the numbers would help us decide whether she needed a C-section.
I was as filled with anticipation as I had been at the ultrasound. Dr. Dickley, the vet, looked pleased with Breeze’s development and asked me for dates: when had she been bred the first, second, and third times? Ever the efficient mom, I had brought my calendar with me so that there would be no question.
I put Breeze up on the table, turned her on her side, and left the room as they shot the X-ray, but when they put the films up on the light board, nothing showed. At all. No spines, no legs, no toes. I looked on in disbelief.
“Maybe she resorbed them,” observed Dr. Dickley calmly.
I wasn’t calm at all. Dawn, too, looked dismayed.
“We had heartbeats just a month ago,” I said with despair.
“Maybe your dates are off?” he suggested. “Come on, let’s do an ultrasound.”
Back up on the table, this time in a cradle, Breeze on her back this time. And then suddenly, there they were again, spinning head over foot, side to side, paws and arms and legs and spines and heads all visible. It had just been too early, I realized with relief. As usual, I had rushed things as a way of dealing with my worry.
“Come back for the X-ray in four days,” Dr. Dickley pronounced. “The ones we are seeing are certainly viable. Good strong heartbeats. You need to count your dates again.”
I went home and worked with the calendar, this time counting from the second time she had been bred rather than the first. I also factored in the new information Dr. Dickley had given us that embryos could sometimes float around, fertilized, for as much as seven days before settling down to embed in the uterus. There was actually far more variability than I had realized when I had counted the days till delivery. I called Karen at WhelpWise, and we recalculated Breeze’s dates with the new information. She reassured me with the news th
at she had been through all this before and had yet to deliver a litter of puppies who came without bones.
With both Rhiannon and Ashley, we had done none of these tests. We had just waited for nature to take its course. And it had all worked out fine. But this time around, it seemed risky to me. I was more anxious, an older mother. There was better medical information and assistance available to us, and it seemed smart to use whatever we could to ensure both Breeze’s health and the puppies’ as well. I just hadn’t planned on it to backfire.
Now time seemed to move excruciatingly slowly. Brad and Myrna were especially supportive, but I just couldn’t relax. Dawn was dealing with the uncertainty a different way: she blocked it out and didn’t want to hear anything negative. Michele was quiet, but reassuring.
The fourth day arrived, but there were only a few faint visible spines and maybe a single skull. Once again, we did a sonogram, and there they all were, cartwheeling around, moving in an array of life. “It must still be too early,” Dr. Dickley advised.
This time, I made the appointment for five days later. This time, bones would show or they wouldn’t. I kept having nightmares of delivering jelly babies. Karen and I recalculated again.
Despite the anxiety, I told myself to be sensible and get everything ready. Breeze’s time was only a couple of weeks away, and I needed something to do while I waited. So I demolished the guest room. Packed away were the new comforter and pillow shams I had just bought for the bed. Up to the attic went the good lamp, and out came a worn old thing with a peeling shade that gave brighter light.
And underneath it all was the wish, made of magic, that she was carrying a show boy for me, a boy to whom I could give all the love I had once given to Gulliver. Not a replacement for him, but a way of going back to loving once again.
Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair With Thirty-Eight Dalmatians Page 16