| Phoenix |
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| Ykelenstam's Forever Phoenix, born November 29, 2002. Our dearest Phoenix.....let me take you back to a very unexpected and pleasurable moment at birth that delivered this beautiful tiny black and silver creature into my hands....I never knew both parents carried the black and silver gene, so it was quite a shock to have our first ever b/s puppy brought into this world, being even more special since it had always been my favorite of the colors and I never thought I would own one for a long time if ever. Now take us ahead to adulthood....she delivered a wonderful first litter of 8 beautiful pups, had no problems at all, a picture perfect delivery, where we kept another b/s daughter, Zuleika, to further work on our unexpected b/s lines. Then two heats later, in the fall of 2004, she was bred again and was due right around Christmas time. About a week before Christmas, she went into premature labour due to a huge oversized pup that had placental separation and was trying unsucessfully to be delivered, and an emergency c-section was necessary to try and save the mother and pups. Unfortunately, the pups' lungs were not developed enough to survive and they were not even coated with hair yet, and one by one the beautiful litter of nine babies died in our hands next to their anxious worried mama, as we tried everything we could, unsuccessfully, to help them breathe and survive. Her beautiful litter of pups had three colors, b/s, s/p and white, and it broke our hearts to lose those babies one by one over a 24 hour period, and it broke Phoenix's heart as well. She was such a wonderful mom, caring so expertly and lovingly for her babies with such joy in her eyes, it was truly heartbreaking to watch that happen to her. She was depressed for a very very long time, she never seemed herself after that and we prayed that eventually she would have another litter and get over the huge loss. Well it was not to be....she came into heat normally about 5 months or so after that, and of course we never bred her at that time, we would wait for the next heat, but after this heat was over she began to have problems with infections, and we tried antibiotics which we thought she had responded to, and when the pills were gone, the infection came back much worse and with a vengeance, and she had to have an emergency spay due to life-threatening pyometra which is a severe potentially fatal uterine infection. When the vet went in to do the spay, he found that many of her organs had fused together with her uterus and the abdominal wall, after the previous surgery at Christmas time. It was a very difficult and delicate operation to separate the organs from one another without causing any nicks that would allow spillage of infection or urine etc. into the abdomen. Thank heavens we have such a wonderful vet and he did a super job, and she did fine and recovered fully after such a horrendous ordeal. The wonderful thing is that her personality then slowly also returned to almost normal, we think her hormones had been terribly out of whack which caused her depression and also probably had something to do with the pyometra. It saddens us that she never quite went back to her orignal people loving personality, I guess after all she went through in and out of vet clinics, through so much physical and emotional trauma and near death, she just never could come to easily trust strangers again after her ordeals. Who says dogs do not have feelings/emotions is so very wrong. Our dearest Phoenix still lives in spoiled comfort, and she jockeys for position on the pillows between my and my husband's heads at bedtime, it is always a sight to watch her and several others all try and get the number one spot....lol....such is the life of our dogs here. |
