Izzy is a 6 year old Pointer who came in as an emergency at the beginning of April as she was having trouble whilst giving birth. Unfortunately Izzy wasn’t having very strong contractions. She had given birth to a stillborn puppy at home and hadn’t really progressed since then.

When Izzy came in we gave her several medications to try and help with her contractions. With some help she gave birth to three live pups and, sadly, another stillborn pup. However, despite the medication we were concerned that Izzy was exhausted and still not having very strong contractions. As we could feel another puppy in the birth canal we decided to take an x-ray to see how many puppies Izzy had yet to deliver. We thought that if Izzy just had one last pup she may be able to delivery naturally. However to our surprise we could count at least SIX more puppies yet to come.

We knew that Izzy would not be able to deliver the rest of the puppies naturally, as her contractions were now even weaker. This meant that we had to perform a caesarean. There can be lots of reasons why we need to operate when dogs are having problems whelping. Some like Izzy just don’t have good uterine contractions, in others pups can get stuck, either because they are presented in the wrong way or because they are just too big to fit through the birth canal. In these cases a caesarean can be a true emergency and can make the difference between life or death for both mum and the pups.

Even though we were expecting lots of pups when we started the caesarean, we were still surprised when we delivered a further SEVEN! All the puppies were bright and lively following delivery and Izzy, despite being so tired, recovered really well.

Since then the all ten puppies have been growing fast, keeping both Izzy and her owners very busy.