Rough Day

I always say that every litter teaches me something. Sometimes it's those hard life lessons, like not all babies can or should survive. Sometimes it's just opportunities for personal growth, like learning patience or not to judge too soon. Sometimes it's actually fun things. Well, at the moment, we are learning that life can be fragile and can change quickly.

Don't worry, we still have 9 pups and Risk but Mr Brown is a sick boy at the moment. We aren't sure what happened yesterday but I'm suspecting that he got bitten by a spider. At 4 PM, a number of us were playing with the pups and he was fine. At 8:30 PM, I checked on him and almost passed out. His neck was so hugely swollen that he couldn't lower his chin. He looked like he had a truly terrible case of the mumps. A quick call to my vet to get guidance for the evening and we were set, although for a rather sleepless and restless night. Mr Brown acted fine, nursing and crawling, but he clearly had something serious going on.

Risk went to work on him, obsessing over his neck. It became clear after a while that this was an abscess of some sort with small bruise mark on the side of his neck. By midnight, Risk had ruptured the abscess and the swelling had diminished immensely. However, this left a pretty significant hole in Mr Brown's neck. We all made it through the night and headed for my vet's this morning where his poor neck was shaved, squeezed, flushed, packed and so on. It was rough on all of us but it had to be done.

He's back home now with his littermates and acting like nothing is wrong. He's nursing well and certainly active in the box. The hole in his neck is pretty startling to look at but is clean and does not look at all infected. We have four days of treatments to give him and then we'll go back to see Dr Jim on Tuesday.

I did get a video up of the litter as of this morning. I'll get some photos up tomorrow. In the meantime, think positive thoughts for this little guy.