DENISE FLAIM
January 15, 2007
‘I think there’s another one there,” I said to my husband, Fred, pointing to the middle of Diva’s flank.
With a flourish, Fred squirted some ultrasound gel on the side of our supine dog, then placed the wand of the portable Doppler ultrasound on the blue glop of gel. He rotated the microphone-size probe slowly and at different angles, listening for the sound we had heard 13 times before. From the base unit’s speaker, we heard some gurgling (Diva did have a hefty dinner), the crackle of static, and then …
A faint thwackety-thwack. Thwackety-thwack.
The sound got louder and faster, sounding like a broken spoke on a bicycle. And as it did, the numbers on the Doppler’s digital display climbed. 75 … 123 … 195 … 220.
Thwackety-thwack. Thwackety-thwack. There it was: Diva’s 14th puppy.
Welcome to modern canine maternity.
As most readers of this column know, in my spare time I show and breed Rhodesian Ridgebacks. For this litter, Diva’s third and last, I decided to use WhelpWise (whelpwise .com), a Colorado-based “veterinary perinatal service” that uses equipment intended for preemie human babies on their canine counterparts.
Former nurse and WhelpWise founder Karen Copley began to think veterinary medicine needed better obstetrical tools after she found herself the new owner of a pregnant goat. Every vet she visited refused to perform an ultrasound to confirm pregnancy, saying goats just didn’t kid that time of year. After sneaking the bleating mother-to-be into the hospital where she worked (it’s amazing what doctors don’t notice when they’re in a meeting), Copley did her own ultrasound and confirmed that her nanny goat was indeed pregnant - with quadruplets.
And so WhelpWise was born. To date, the service has monitored some 14,000 female dogs, and its $400 fee includes rental equipment and round-the-clock phone support.
About a week before their dog’s due date, human midwives are sent a Doppler ultrasound to find fetal heartbeats and then monitor them to make sure the puppies are not in distress. They also receive a uterine-contraction monitor with instructions to transmit the blips and bops of the mama-to-be’s uterus over the phone to WhelpWise. Based on the type of contractions a dog is having, WhelpWise can determine if there is a “stuck” puppy or still more on the way - and whether a C-section might be advisable.
All this isn’t to say there weren’t skeptics. “This is black magic,” said Fred the first night we convinced a very rotund Diva to lie on her right side while we located the puppies’ heartbeats. I drew seven little circles on the doggie diagram WhelpWise provided, jotting down the heart rates, too. Then I handed Fred a Sharpie so he could draw them on Diva’s expansive belly - all the better to find them the next time.
“This is kind of like pinging for shipwrecks with sonar,” mused my fisherman-husband, grudgingly drawing the blue circles on Diva’s taut abdomen.
If Fred had any doubts, they were assuaged on whelping day. Diva started delivering at 7 a.m. The first little fellow came as a surprise, gushing into the world atop our pillowtop bed. (You can’t flip it - the mattress, that is, not the puppy - so when the Sleepy’s sales guy tries to get you to spend that extra $50 for an impermeable mattress pad, buy it.)
At regular intervals, Fred applied and removed the uterine monitor and transmitted the results. When Diva’s contractions slowed - imperceptibly, to us - WhelpWise checked with our vet, Robert Monaco of Old Country Animal Clinic in Plainview, before having us use one of two drugs: Calphosan, an injectable calcium that increases the strength of contractions, and, toward the end, the more powerful Oxytocin, a drug that increases their frequency. The two microdoses of Oxytocin that WhelpWise recommended - each as small as a raindrop - had their desired effect: They kept Diva’s labor steady without sending her into what Copley calls
“nuclear labor.”
My biggest concern was that the last puppy would be stillborn, which had happened in each of Diva’s previous litters. I was planning on keeping a female from this one. “You watch,” I predicted to Monaco. “That last puppy is going to be a beautiful show-prospect girl.”
By 5:30 p.m., we were done. No stillborns, no hand-wringing, no uterine inertia. In just over 10 hours, Diva whelped a puppy every 45 minutes, right down to number 14 - a big, strapping show girl.
I don’t know if she’ll ultimately be the one we keep. But I do know that whenever we have a litter in the future, “pinging for puppies” is the way we’re going to go.