The Last 48

When you eliminate all other possibilities, what remains, no matter how improbable, is the answer. – Sherlock Holmes

The last 48 hours has been a real roller coaster.

On Tuesday evening I posted an entry about Stewie beginning to crash. He was lethargic, doing abdominal breathing, and moving his mouth as though gasping for air. Bottle fed orphans are always very high risk fosters, and we were at a loss to explain how his condition could decline so dramatically in just a few hours. We got him to the shelter as soon as we could.

CCHS Medical Director, Jessica Buchholz, gave Stewie a thorough examination. Aspiration pneumonia is a constant worry with bottle-fed pups, but his lungs sounded fine. We don’t know why Stewie’s mom died. Could he have caught something from her that’s just now showing up? The only thing Jessica could do was supportive therapy. Stewie was put into a makeshift oxygen tent to ease his breathing and he was given subcutaneous fluids to treat his dehydration and Nutri-Cal to boost his blood sugar. Frankly, no one expected him to make it through the night. Shelter Manager, Michelle McKnight, took Stewie home with her so she could keep an eye on him. Michelle spent many years in the medical lab at CCHS and had access to anything she might need if his conditions worsened. I left CCHS depressed that we may have lost a pup with no idea why and no idea what implications there were for the four others in the litter.

On Wednesday morning we hadn’t heard any news of Stewie so I called Jessica. “Is he still with us?” I asker her. She told me Michelle hadn’t come in yet and she wasn’t sure of his status. I was going to have to check with Michelle. It’s the sort of call you don’t want to make, but have to. I called Michelle at home to see what happened over night. I was stunned when she told me that no only did he live through the night, but that they got him to eat almost a half jar of baby food! Apparently he wouldn’t take any formula from the bottle so they tried strained beef out of desperation. We met Michelle at CCHS, picked up Stewie, and brought him home. Despite his ordeal he had only lost a few grams of body weight. Amazing.

Everything was going fine on Wednesday all the way through the noon feeding. Jessica decided to come out to look over the litter to check each of the pups. She arrived in time for the 3 pm feeding. Each pup was given a check up. Jessica didn’t hear the telltale lung sounds of pneumonia in any of them, allowing us to rule out pneumonia as the cause of the problems. While Jessica was here we heard some nasal congestion noises and almost every pup blew milk out of its nose as soon as it started to nurse. Now what? With nothing conclusive to go by we decided to wait out the rest of the day to see what would happen.

Harriett went down to do the 7 pm feeding and called me to come down to have a look at Brian. He had been one of the strongest pups in the litter and was fine when Jessica was here four hours earlier. But now he was starting to show the same symptoms that Stewie had the night before. Again we were immediately on the phone to Jessica. Brian was not as bad as Stewie had been, so the decision was made to do the supporting therapy here and call her if he took a turn for the worse. Harriett decided to sleep downstairs next to the puppy room. She wasn’t going to be able to sleep anyway and she’d be close enough to check on him throughout the night. By 11 pm almost every pup was beginning to show the same symptoms, even Megan, the largest, strongest puppy. Something very bad was happening and we had no idea what it was or what to do about it.

At about 2 am on Thursday morning Harriett had a revelation. She kept asking herself how was it that Stewie made such a fast recovery? Why is every puppy getting sick now? Why is Stewie sick again? What has changed? Then it came to her and she started putting the pieces together. A couple of days before we had run out of Esbilac and she had opened another package. We buy milk replacer powder in bulk and keep it in the freezer. We had been using “old formula” Esbilac but the new package was of a newer formulation. She checked the labels but didn’t see any difference. She did a few searches on the web and, BINGO!, there it was. Many people, especially wildlife rehab groups, had reported severe problems when they started to use the new formula milk replacer. Web forums were full of speculation that ran the gamut from the product being tainted with metals to problems with the fat and other components not staying in suspension. Things were starting to make sense. While Stewie was away he didn’t get any of the new formula. Too tired to keep searching, at 3 am Harriett sent a note with a few links to CCHS Web Mistress, Barbara Meyer, an internet research expert and early-morning riser. Then she went to bed.

By the time we got up on Thursday morning, Barbara had found many reports of problems with the milk replacer. She also found a few sites that proposed solutions. So there we had it. The formula we were using was making the puppies sick. We took the entire litter to CCHS on Thursday morning. Jessica rigged up an oxygen cage using an old aquarium and the pups spent several hours under her watchful eyes. Each pup was given fluids and Nutri-Cal as needed through the day. They all improved. CCHS still had “old formula” milk replacer in their freezer and by 4 pm all of the pups had started eating again and were ready to come home.

They’re all back. Tonight’s 7 pm feeding went very well and hopefully this episode is behind us. This story illustrates the incredible support system CCHS has in place to back us up. Without the oxygen system in the surgical suite at the Shelter or the knowledge and expertise of Jessica and Michelle the outcome would have been very different for the pups. Barbara was able to find, in a very short time, information that other people would have taken days to locate if they were able to find it at all. I’ve always said that Harriett and I could not do this job alone and this is an excellent example of that truth.