•••
Before the next X-ray, I began to practice with both the uterine monitor and the Doppler, as WhelpWise had suggested, even though it was a bit early to be monitoring. Over time, as I grew proficient with the equipment, I found the hour-long sessions calmed me. If I could hear heartbeats, then surely those babies were alive and kicking. Surely they must have the beginnings of bones. Surely the upcoming test in a few days would show us what I wanted so badly to see.
But the first time Breeze and I tried the monitor, it was a disaster. Just getting the tethering straps untangled was a nightmare, and, to my chagrin, I had to enlist Brad’s help. Eventually, we finally got it all arranged correctly. But then Breeze refused to hold still and kept rolling around onto her back, throwing her huge belly up into the air. At last I convinced her that lying on her side wasn’t so bad when you got your head stroked endlessly, but just when we’d gotten about twenty good minutes of timing under the belt, Brad came through the door and she scrambled up, having had enough of it all, and went to get her ball.
So, I gave up and the next night went back to try to record and listen. Using the monitor went more smoothly, and so I dared to try the Doppler. Itchy to hear those heartbeats, I needed to learn how to time them with my watch to obtain baseline figures for each one. Those figures would later tell us if a puppy had gone into distress.
This night, Breeze lay on her side quietly and snoozed while I stroked the sides of her abdomen with the square head of the Doppler, looking for some sign of life. Nothing. My hands grew sweaty, and it became harder to push the Doppler around. After a while, my fingers began to ache as I kept pushing the head into her side, down below her ribs, up and across her taut belly. Nothing. I tried manipulating the small instrument back and forth, in a circle, up and down, as if it were a searchlight in a dark room, and I used the connect-the-dots map for the likely locations of the fetuses. Nothing.
And then, suddenly, I caught one: galloping hooves, a frantic, fast-paced clippety-clop. No whoosh-whoosh, or lub-dub, lub-dub, like in humans, but a quick, multitoned beat, so fast it was hard to count the pulses. I pressed the Doppler head in even deeper, and the sound magnified. There was no doubt that I had found a puppy. Here was 200, then 210, then 225—the desired rate.
By the time I was done and ready to go to bed, I had heard six and accordingly marked the spots where they were on her belly with a green felt-tip Sharpie, as recommended, to help me locate them the next day and afterward. Brad and I joked that now she was a black-and-white-and-green spotted dog. Before I finished up that night, I went back to the first heartbeat, the one I could hear most clearly, just to listen one more time. And there it was, galloping onward to sweet dreams.
nineteen
TWO WEEKS BEFORE BREEZE’S due date, while Dawn was gone on a two-week vacation and I was still waiting for the next X-ray, I sat on the bed beside her and slid the uterine monitor under her belly. I had just gotten off the phone with Myrna, who was feeling poorly. The temperature was in the 90s, with only a little breeze that fluttered at the curtain over the window.
Breeze didn’t complain, so neither did I. I felt as if we were a team, like a mother and daughter who were going to Lamaze classes together. She stretched out on her side, let me slide the monitoring disk under her (with Karen’s approval, we had abandoned the straps and tether method), and then wagged her tail. Because she wasn’t allowed to move at all, I had devised a system to keep her from moving her tail as well: a pillow kept that metronome of happiness still.
As these sessions had become more routine, Breeze had likewise become more relaxed about them. Despite being an active, rambunctious Dal who liked to play with her blue football more than she liked to eat (well, almost), she seemed to sense the need to do these exercises, and so held still for the entire hour without moving even a bit, other than that enthusiastic tail. She just closed her eyes and took a long snooze.
This afternoon, as usual, after we were finished and she had been joyfully released from her position of immobility, I sent the recording in to the base station.
The phone rang quickly. “She’s in labor,” Karen said, “and it’s too early by twelve days.”
Panic set in. My adrenaline began to surge. “What do we do?” Never had I been so glad to say “we.”
“Get on the phone to the vet and get her some terbutaline and some progesterone. Tell them it’s an emergency.”
A quick call to Dr. Cain’s office informed me that she was away in Italy for the month, so I called our regular animal hospital, only to be told that Dr. Dickley was in surgery. I pressed his technician to go and ask for the prescription, but when she did, Dr. Dickley sent back word that he never prescribed either drug, that Breeze was aborting the litter and nothing could be done. “He says you can deliver her at home,” the tech reported. “Or if you feel you can’t handle a stillborn litter, you can bring her in here and we’ll take care of it for you.”
I hung up with a bang. Obviously, there was a solution—Karen’s solution. As midwife to litter after litter, she had handled many that were premature. And even I recognized terbutaline from my days, back in the eighties, with my high-risk pregnancy with Nathaniel. Terbutaline was hardly a novel drug. I was not going to find any answers for Breeze’s predicament with Dr. Dickley, whom I now perceived as downright ignorant.
I quickly dialed Dr. Cain’s office again, looking for some help from someone there, anyone, but was told, sympathetically, that there was no one covering her reproductive patients. And so I began frantically combing the Bay Area for a vet who knew about terbutaline and would prescribe it.
Dawn was still on vacation. Alone with my fear, I would not surrender to sitting there helplessly. Yet, everywhere I turned, knowledgeable vets were away for weeks or were over a four-hour drive from my home. I called WhelpWise once more, and this time Karen suggested that I call Dr. Cain’s service back one more time and ask to speak with her technician. Maybe she would be able to introduce me to someone else on staff who would be willing to work with WhelpWise, even if they had no prior experience with the team there.
Over the phone I met Dr. Bain (an odd but auspicious name twist), who had heard of terbutaline and progesterone injections to stop canine labor and told me to come in immediately.
I took off for the office over the long San Mateo Bridge, driving as safely past the speed limit as I thought prudent, but still I was terrified that Breeze would give birth in the car, as the office was an hour away. When I got there, I was rewarded by a genuinely gratifying experience: Dr. Bain had no ego problem with letting WhelpWise chart the course we would follow. My anxiety began to ease a bit. Suddenly we were in compassionate and knowledgeable hands.
But a quick X-ray, still earlier than the one we had scheduled with Dr. Dickley, was imperative now to predict the puppies’ development, and it revealed only some slight skeletal improvement. It wasn’t what we needed or wanted to see because it meant they weren’t developed enough to be born. We were at least twelve days away from a normal delivery, which in a human birth would mean only that the prospective baby needed a stay in a neonatal intensive care unit, but which for a dog meant the death of the pups because a dog’s gestational period was so much shorter—sixty-three days rather than nine months.
And even then, the situation was more complicated than I had first understood. Progesterone played a large part in the premature labor, and so Dr. Bain was reluctant to administer the terbutaline immediately, without testing her blood levels; for complicated reasons, if the progesterone should still be normal, the terbutaline would have little or no effect and do nothing toward stopping the labor.
I didn’t want to wait. “Is there some side effect to the terbutaline that could endanger her or the pups?” I asked quietly.
“No, but it might just be a waste of time and money until we know the blood levels.”
I shook my head. “But I don’t care about those. If we give the terbutaline now, we won’t have lost any
thing, whereas if we wait and the levels are low, she will probably go into hard labor soon, and by tomorrow afternoon when the test comes in, it’ll be too late.”
He tapped his teeth with his pen and paused for a minute. Then he pulled out his prescription pad.
The tech did a blood draw marked urgent. Still, the results wouldn’t come back until late the following afternoon.
Back at home I texted Dawn. I called Michele, who was extremely concerned and sympathetic; Breeze was part of her family, too. She remarked that it must be hard to have Dawn away at this particular time. Vehemently, I agreed. Dawn called quite quickly to check on Breeze’s progress, but how I wished she were here to help keep this particular vigil. The time the puppies required to remain in utero stretched out like a long solitary road before me.
The next morning, a call came from Dr. Bain, who indicated that the progesterone was indeed low. What a good thing it was that I had a vet who would work with me instead of ignoring me. Being pushy had paid off.
The next twelve days went by: one hour, then the next. The medication had to be administered every eight hours exactly, preceded by a monitoring session of an hour’s duration so that we could assess whether we needed to increase the dose. Breeze lay on her side, eyes closed, the very essence of patience. Sometimes, on the 5:00 AM shift, we would doze together, the green light of the recorder blinking, just perceptible through my half-mast eyes. Gone were the days of frolicking in the yard: she was allowed no exercise and had to be walked on a leash.
Each time I waited for the report to come in, I felt I was clinging to a cliff: she would have two or three contractions in the hour with high uterine irritability; then the next session, there would be no contractions with no irritability. Back and forth it went. We were picking our way through a minefield, waiting every eight hours for the news I feared the most—the word that hard labor had started and could not be stopped. And always, after each session, Breeze rolled onto her back so that I could spend another forty-five minutes measuring the magical heartbeats that galloped away beneath the thin wall of her skin, just under my fingertips. The puppies began to poke back at me with their paws, their legs, butting their heads against the pressure of the Doppler. I didn’t need an X-ray to tell me they had bones now.
The final day of waiting drew near. I began to believe we would make it, that my wish for a healthy litter would be fulfilled, that a boy would come into my life again. Anxiety began to give way to hope.
PART IX
the puppy pen
{NOT IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE}
Pink
Blue
Purple
Green
Red
Yellow
twenty
WHELPWISE HAD ADVISED US that because the first shot of progesterone had stilled the uterus for so long, the uterus might not respond well to the rigors of labor. The pups could be at risk, and so Dawn and I had grown resigned to the idea that Breeze must have an elective Cesarean section. Dawn came home at last, and on Sunday night, July 10, Dr. Cain returned from Italy and called us immediately after she saw the reports that had come in during her absence. We were to bring Breeze in first thing in the morning so that she could see how my girl was doing.
After I spoke with Dr. Cain, Brad helped me out by doing the monitoring session himself while I went to bed early. He was given the all clear by WhelpWise and woke me to say so. No contractions at all. I got up to check her and give her a hug on my way to the bathroom and thought that she was acting a bit on the strange side. She had moved from her regular bed on the chair to the one Gulliver had used once he couldn’t jump up onto his chair, now tucked away in the corner. I had never been able to bring myself to put it away. Restlessly she turned around and around on its cushions, circling. It looked like early labor to me, but WhelpWise had told Brad things were copacetic.
I woke him to ask if he was sure that the sensor had been well enough tucked under her body. At his sleepy nod, I went back to bed and promised myself I’d check her again in an hour.
But it wasn’t till the alarm went off at five o’clock that I woke. I got up to do the early-morning session and sent the report in over the modem at six. A few minutes later, Karen called: Breeze was in active labor. She called Dr. Cain for me while I got everything ready for our trip across the bay.
While Dawn was driving up from her house, I packed the car like a whelping box, just in case Breeze delivered en route. Sheets, towels, the warming box, and a microwave disk, shaped like a solid Frisbee, which would help keep the pups warm after they were born. Everything went into a suitcase and the suitcase went into the car and Dawn and I took off for San Ramon.
As soon as we arrived, they monitored her and reported back that she was indeed in hard labor. A C-section was quickly set up, and before we knew it, we were standing in front of a large glass window watching the surgery. Dr. Cain made a long incision along the abdomen and then began reaching inside. Out came one of the long uterine “horns” where the puppies still nested, attached by their umbilical cords. I felt faint, as I had initially with Rhiannon’s whelping, knelt on the floor for a minute, and then stood again, determined not to miss the unfolding scene.
Dr. Cain was tugging so hard that the muscles in her arms stood out in sharp relief. One by one, she began to pull them out. It was like extracting a wine cork from a bottle. Later she would tell us that one of the pups had been wedged into the birth canal, undoubtedly causing the irritable action of the uterus over the last two weeks, and because he was blocking the exit, none of them would have survived a natural whelping.
As we watched, out popped the first head. An assembly line of techs waited with their hands out, ready to get each pup going. They shook the mucus and fluid from the puppies’ lungs, then warmed them with a brisk rubdown, handling them as roughly as the mother would have until we heard that first magical cry, just a small peep into the world.
But one of the things every Dal breeder doesn’t want to see was apparent as that first babe slid out into the world: a patch, dark black, marring the smooth pink color of the ear. A patch was an instant disqualification for the show ring, though puppies so marked made wonderful pets and were often the first sold out of a litter because of the dramatic asymmetrical marking. We bit back our disappointment and kept peering into the surgical suite as the rest made their entrance into the world. Number two and three and four and five and six arrived, all healthy, all mewling and squirming with life.
But by the time Dr. Cain was closing the incision with strong sutures, it was obvious that one girl and two boys out of the six were patched. My main emotion was one of relief at this living litter, one that we had so nearly lost. Still, 50 percent of them were patched. I comforted myself that at least there still was the chance of a show boy for me.
We were given a thermal box lined with a heating pad for the small white infants, who had no spots at all except for the three with their inky patches. They climbed over each other, mewing like kittens, reminding me of those early days at home when Rosie and Violet gave birth. When we switched the pups to the warming box I had brought with me, so carefully prepared, it was hilariously too small, and the newborns immediately began a concerted escape routine, though they were both blind and weak. Up they went and down we pushed, gently.
I looked eagerly for the boy who was destined to be mine. I found him and scooped him up with care. That was when I saw it: an under-ear patch, small but definite. I was dumbfounded. There was no show boy here for me after all. The litter was 80 percent patched.
How could this have happened? Bad luck, perhaps, or something we, as breeders, just didn’t understand yet. It was all part of the crapshoot, the uncertainty of what you could get: the litter could be all girls and no boys, patches, deafs, no show puppies at all. Stupidly, I hadn’t prepared myself for such an outcome. I hadn’t said to myself, there may be no puppy here for me. I had just listened to those heartbeats joyfully, waiting for my boy to be born, waiting for an
other boy whom I could love in some of the ways I had loved Gulliver.
I had hoped to curl up with him in the evening on my bed, to whisper in his ear, to have his soft eyes regard me with patience and love. And to pick up where I had left off: bonding with him as we raced around the show ring. I had wanted to launch Literati once again. In this instant, that became an impossibility. Dawn would take her pick of the girls, and there was only a very slim chance that both would be show quality and that one could be mine. And only if, I cautioned myself, I had wanted to keep a female, and have two bitches in my household, after all my troubled history with Rhiannon and Tia.
No boy for me repeated like a mantra in my mind. It seemed a bitter turn of circumstance that there were two girls for Dawn to choose from and nothing for me to keep. I was envious while she was cheerful; though of course there were many hurdles yet to cross, she nevertheless had a shot at finding the little girl she wanted.
As I drove home, I tried simply to listen to the little cries I could hear from the backseat, where Dawn sat with the cardboard box on her lap. I unpacked the car and drew the towel on the top of the box aside so that Brad could have a peek. I looked down at them and felt, despite my disappointment, like a proud parent, and I could tell from Brad’s face that he felt the same. For him, it didn’t matter a bit whether there was a show puppy. And while it did matter to me, it mattered more that they were all alive.
We carried the babies into the house and helped Breeze out of the car, mindful of her stitches and her ordeal. And then we settled everyone in to the new nursery.
twenty-one
THE VET HAD WARNED us that after a C-Section, Breeze might have a difficult time accepting her pups. We wouldn’t be able to leave her alone with them for even a minute. And so I sat for hours in the whelping box with her, keeping my hand on her head so that there was no chance of her snapping and maiming one of the babies, or of cannibalization—all grim possibilities for a bitch who had not seen her whelp be born, who had looked down at them for the first time and wondered, What the hell are these?
Bespotted: My Family's Love Affair With Thirty-Eight Dalmatians Page 17