[ShelbysMOMMA]

I just need a little reassurance. My baby just had her first litter, and as prepared as I thought I was, I was not prepared to lose a pup. The pup I lost was not breathing or moving, and was wrapped in the placenta. I immediately got to work on her, ripping the placenta away and the sack off. It took about 5 minutes of vigorous rubbing and swinging her downward to get all the fluid out. She began breathing and squealing, and I thought all was good. She began nursing with some encouragement from me about 2 hours later and did great for the first day and night. Before going to sleep the night after the whelping (22 hours after the first born), all the pups were doing great nursing, and had all gained between .2 and .3 oz.

I got up about 4 hours later (5:30 am), and the pups were all still doing really well nursing. Around 10 am I noticed that the little one couldn't get access to Shelby, as the bigger pups kept pushing her out of the way. I weighed her at that time and found she had lost .5 oz. I kept trying to give her some alone time nursing, but she just wouldn't latch on. I called the vet at 10:45, and the only practicing Dr was out of the office for the day, and that he would call me back. About 15 minutes later, I got a call from the vet's office, the assistant said she spoke to the vet and he wanted me to try to bottle feed the pup. I started trying at 11:15, and 5 minutes later, she went stiff and fell over, I immediately called the vet back, and was told to take her to the emergency hospital 20 minutes away because my vet couldn't get back to the office any quicker than I could get to the ER.

I got to the ER at 11:40, and they immediately rushed her in to work on her. About 20 minutes later the Dr came in to tell me that the prognosis was poor, they couldn't get her to take any formula in, she kept regurgitating, and they tried to start and IV, but she was so tiny that her veins kept collapsing. Ultimately, there was nothing she could do, she kept crashing and coming back. The vet went back to work on her for another 20 minutes and then came back and said she crashed another 5 times (a total of 9 times since they began working on her), and that she recommended euthanasia, since the pup was a "poor doer" since birth, and there wasn't anything more they could do for her. So we had to put her down. I was unbelievably heart breaking, considering I had bonded so much with her, since if it wasn't for me she would have been alive in the first place (Shelby had shown no interest in this particular pup at all), and we had just decided we were going to keep her.

How common is it for something like this to happen? I knew this was a possibility when I decided to breed Shelby, but I still wasn't prepared for the heart breaking agony I would experience. I did all my research, bought a bunch of breeding books, and prepared myself for a whole year (it took that long for the stud to finally show interest in mating with Shelby), and I still can't get over losing this puppy.

I have been beating myself up for days with what-ifs. The vet says there was nothing I could have done differently and that if she had survived the lack of oxygen at birth could have caused brain damage and unpredictable health issues, and she would not have lived long.

Has anyone else ever felt this awful over losing a puppy??