Curlious Chinese Cresteds

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The best laid plans of mice and men...

Unfortunately our litter with NV (Ch Crestars Sweet Pleazures PF, RN, CGN) and Ntare (Ch Altair's Ntare) didn't work out quite the way we planned. With 2 weeks left to go in her pregnancy, NV had an obvious loss of girth in her abdomen. A trip to the vet and an x-ray showed the 5 puppies were most likely dead. View the x-ray.We were then referred to the specialists at the University of Guelph for an ultrasound which confirmed the loss of life to the puppies.

The ultrasound two days later showed 2 remaining puppies, the others had further decomposed past the point of recognition. It also showed NV's uterus was full of pus, and when doing an internal exam found her cervix closed, making the option of inducing her to pass the dead pups on her own very risky. We then had the option of doing a c-section to remove the pups, or do a total spay. The specialists believed that any future breeding would most likely be very difficult for NV to carry to term successfully, we made the decision to have her spayed.

Upon doing the surgery, they found NV's uterus to be full of thick pus/mucus which was almost the consistancy of bread dough. Inducing her would have been impossible, and doing a c-section would have been very difficult (if not impossible). They would have had to spay anyways. The total weight of the uterus was 450 grams, just 4 grams shy of a full pound. View a picture of the cleaned out uterus and 2 remaining puppies. (WARNING this image is graphic!)

This picture was taken after they removed all the copious green discharge. As you see, there were five attachment sites (the green areas in the uterus), indicating that there were five pups originally. Strangely, they found only three corpora lutea (CL's) on her one ovary. The other ovary had no structure on it. Usually there are the same number or more CL's than the number of pups. And even the remaining three CL's appeared very small and inactive. Therefore, we are suspecting hypoluteoidism (insufficient production of the pregnancy hormone progesterone) as the reason for abortion. Even if they had been able to fully clean out the dough-like discharge, the prognosis wasn't good for future fertility.

Although this is not the ending I wanted to my first litter, I'm very happy that my little girl is going to be okay, with no lasting side effects from her ordeal.