A 3 pound Miracle with a Broken Heart!

It has been a while since I have written a blog, I really wish I was better at keeping up on this.  I really need this outlet to get my thoughts and experiences on paper.  Today I want to write about a little puppy that we got and his amazing story.

When we first got Radar, he was 6 weeks old, the runt of the litter, and not in very good shape.  He only weighed 3 pounds. We were struggling to find a name for him, and we were trying to think of things to do with love because he had an upside down heart on the markings on his side.  We couldn't think of anything that would work for love, or even maybe anti-love because it was upside down so we settled on Radar because he is a hunting breed of dog.  He did not get the regular puppy care before he came to live with us.  He was skinny and obviously suffering from malnutrition, but he had a big swollen abdomen which of course usually means one thing, worms.  We took him into the vet, they told us how dehydrated and under nourished he was because of the infestation of worms.  We gave him two treatments of dewormer, switched him to an expensive type of dog food to give him those extra nutrients so that he could get back to a normal weight.  He finally started to come around, he was no longer lethargic and shaking. He was running around like a normal puppy and starting to put a little weight on his bones. We took him back to the vet to get his shots and he had gained a whole pound.  We were so happy for him to be getting back to being a regular little puppy.

We took him with us to visit our families on Thanksgiving, and he was running around playing with the kids and just being a fun little puppy, everyone loved him.

The next day we were just hanging out at home relaxing for the day after thanksgiving and out of nowhere he just started throwing up in the living room.  We checked him out, he seemed ok, so we just thought that maybe he got into some Thanksgiving food that the kids dropped on the floor and probably upset his stomach.  The next day, we noticed that all he wanted to do was sleep.  He ate a little bit of his food in the morning but mostly just slept all day.  We noticed this change but thought that maybe he was just going through a growth spurt or something and that was the reason he was sleeping.  We kind of just left him alone and let him rest.  We woke up that Sunday, and he was still lethargic, and he wouldn't eat or drink anything.  We put one of his favorite milkbone treats in front of him and he wouldn't touch it.  That is when we knew that something was seriously wrong.  We have known people that had been through Parvovirus with puppies before, and we were worried that he may have somehow contracted it.  We did some searches online to see if there was any kind of treatments that we could do to help him.  Everything online told us that the biggest threat of the virus is dehydration from what the virus does to the intestines.  We immediately drove to the store for pedialyte and baby food, we were determined to nurse him better and we would force it if we had to.  We started to feed him the baby food and pedialyte through a medicine syringe into the back of his mouth so that he had to swallow it.

That night we put the baby gate on the door in our master bathroom so that we could keep an eye on him all night.  That night was horrible, he was throwing up the pedialyte all night.  We woke up about every hour to give him more to make sure that he didn't get too far into dehydration, but it was definitely not looking good for the poor little guy, especially knowing how high the death rate of Parvo is in puppies. We took him to the vet clinic the next day and got him some outpatient treatment.  It took a lot of care and cuddling but eventually he started to eat on his own again.Of course, by the time he started to come around, because he wasn't in the best condition when he got sick, he was just a skeleton with skin and fur.  It was so sad to see him so skinny and sick.  I am happy to say that he has now made a full recovery and is once again gaining weight, he is now just over 8 pounds and is a normal healthy puppy.  Although he has completely recovered, there is one difference that we noticed in him from his experience.  His once solid heart now has a break right through the middle!!! I have heard of people wearing their heart on their sleeve, but who would have thought that you could actually watch it break. Here are some before and after Parvo pictures just in case you don't believe me.  Can you see the broken heart?