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Hi all, a few may remember I posted a few times here a while back. I havent been here in a while as life has been a bit crazy here . In late June my Norma ended up having an emergency c section thanks to an idiot vet. She suffered complications from the section but is fine now. All the pups were fine, but go figure I wanted a bitch and got all males. Then my car exploded. No kidding. Its OK though, it was an old junker and no one was in it. Then Norma injured her eye when playing with another of my bitches and it wouldnt heal and she went blind in it so we had to remove it, that was in Sept. Then Oct my Harley had her first litter. Thank heavens that went very smoothly and she gave me 3 boys/2 girls. Then I was sick most of Nov/Dec. Whew! Now, I have a great new car and happy healthy dogs/puppies so all is right with the world. The pup I kept from Norma's litter is now 6 months old and will be in his first show in a few weeks.

-- Anonymous, January 23, 2001

Answers

Welcome back Susan! Sounds like you have been having a torrid time - no wonder you haven`t had time to post! Pleased to hear that your luck is improving now. It never fails to amaze me how, when things go wrong, they always seem to go wrong en mass.

So you have two little girls to chose from now - are they nice? Are you pleased with them?

When I was at the National in New Jersey, they held a forum on breeding/whelping and associated problems, and an American vet gave a talk on the subject. I was amazed at how much routine medical intervention there seemed to be. Artificial insemination, planned C sections etc. - would you say that is the norm over there, or was I just getting a bit of a lop-sided impression from this particular vet?

BTW, please, please pass on the Shih-Tzu Talkshop information on to some more of your friends - the more people we get on here, the more interesting it will be! (:o)

-- Anonymous, January 24, 2001


Hi! Welcome back on the board.Hard time for you,but i am happy for you that it is over and you are back to normal.LOL

-- Anonymous, January 24, 2001

Hi Roz and Brigette. Yes, too many C-sections in America I will agree. But its definitely not a problem with the shih tzu, most whelp easily. Vets here only know how to treat problems with whelping so they dont know what to do when a dog whelps easily. Norma's c section in my opinion was caused by the vet. She was 65 days along and I was just a bit worried, but she had shown no signs of distress or labor. So I just took her to the vet to have a check to make sure everything was OK. They wanted to observe her for a bit, so I said OK and I went up to my shop and told them very clearly "DONT do anything to her without calling and checking first". Well, they didnt call but went ahead and gave her two large doses of Oxytocin. This got two of the pups out then caused her uterus to rupture. It was that point I called THEM and they needed my permission to c section her. Well, there was no choice at that point as her uterus was ruptured and they c sectioned to get the other two pups out. They then sent her home, but she was very ill. Apparently she'd lost alot of blood. I had to rush her to an emergency clinic for fluids, iron supplement and a blood transfusion. Amazingly, the puppies were fat healthy and thrived despite this. As a side note, she had whelped before easily and had 5 big puppies no trouble. I had one litter before this one and one after, neither had any sort of medical intervention at all. As for AIs, this seems to be done here more out of convenience than necessity. Remember this is a very large country. I live on the east coast and if there was a stud I wanted to use on the west coast, I would either have to ship my bitch or spend about 3-4 days driving each way. And now with the airlines being really strict about shipping dogs, its sometimes impossible to ship or if you can it costs a lot of money. Not to mention the stress placed on a bitch during shipping. So you can see its easier on the breeder, the bitch and the pocketbook LOL to do artificial insemination alot of times as you can just get the semen shipped. Regarding planned c-sections, I havent heard of any shih tzu breeders doing this, there may be some that I dont know of of course, but its definitely not the norm here. And yes, we now have two very nice bitch puppies (HOORAY!!!). Both appear to be turning out nice. Which works out good as both I and the co breeder want a bitch. My male from the c section litter I decided to aptly name Delites Murphys Law, seemed quite appropriate at the time

-- Anonymous, January 24, 2001

You do hear some horror stories about vets!

I had a bad experience with one of the vets at my practice. I used to breed cats, and my persian was ready to whelp her second litter. No problems at all with the first, four perfectly healthy kittens, no drama whatsoever. She went into labour got to the pushing stage and then just suddenly stopped. Not a big deal, it sometimes happens. I left if a couple of hours to give nature a chance, and the queen was not distressed at all. I could still something moving inside her, you know what I mean, a foot or a head or something like that. Very strong movements at that.

Anyway, I took her to the vet as it didn`t look like things were going to get going again on their own. This vet is one of the `doom and gloom` merchants which you sometimes get. Lots of sighs, and tutting. He said to leave her with them for an hour or two and they would see if they could move things along. Like a fool I did! Two hours later I return to see how it was going only to discover that they had done an `emergency` C section and removed one dead kitten AND spayed the queen!!! Boy did we have some kind of `discussion` over that proceedure!

I never got a satisfactory explanation. This old vet (who was obviously much happier working with farm animals) said that he performed the emergency C Section to save the queen, that in his opinion she should not be bred from again, and in the absence of any instruction to the contrary from me, he spayed her for her future health! All he would say about the kitten was that it was dead in the womb and had probably been dead when I took the cat in.

It was a long time ago, and I didn`t have any of the middle aged bravado that I have now, or else I would have probably wiped the floor with him!!!

It taught me to be pedantic in any discussions with vets, even the ones which I like and trust - I would not like the same sort of `misunderstanding` to happen again!

Pleased to hear that things are going well for you now though. And I love the name you have chosen - very clever! (:o)

-- Anonymous, January 24, 2001


Yes, I was so upset at what was going on that I really didnt get upset with the vet until a few days later. I simply mailed the clinic a note explaining why I was not going to pay the bill and never heard from them again so I suppose they knew they did wrong and didnt want to push the issue. Needless to say, I changed vets! By the time Norma was in c section her uterus was so bad she had to be spayed. Shame too as I co own her and her first litter was with her breeders/co owners so this was her first and only litter for me and I got no daughter out of her. But as her co owner pointed out, after all she went through she probably is glad to not ever have puppies again!

-- Anonymous, January 24, 2001


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