Last Thursday night, around midnight, our 17-week-old puppy, Moxie, was having some intestinal distress. We took her out and she had ballistic diarrhea and when she came inside, she vomited several times. Puppies do this so, while we planned not to get much sleep, we were not overly concerned.
Moxie had a relatively quiet night but at 5 a.m., she needed to go outside again and, again, it was ballistic diarrhea followed up with unrelenting vomiting. After about an hour of this, we decided to take her to our vet who is about an hour away. I took Moxie by myself and, with only one stop to clean up the van, we arrived about 9 a.m. Moxie had several more vomiting incidents but was behaving relatively well considering. After several fecal exams to test for giardia, parvo and anything else as well as some blood tests, we still had the symptoms but negative results on all tests. So our vet suggested we take some Xrays to see if Ms. Moxie had eaten anything she should not.
Once we saw the films, we could see that her intestines had a blockage. Leigh, our vet, looked at me and said "if it were my puppy, I'd want to go in there and see what that is." Since 48 hours earlier she had done just that with one of her Dobes, I agreed completely. The vet techs set up the operating room and I escorted Moxie over to it. She went along willingly until she actually saw the inside of the operating room at which point, she stopped and gave me a "you have got to be kidding" look. I scooped her up, placed her on the table and Ms. Moxie got herself prepped for surgery.
Forty five minutes later, we knew she had not swallowed anything but had a functional blockage of her spleen which was displaced and was causing problems with her stomach. Leigh fixed the problem, flushed out the system, stuffed her insides back into her little belly and Moxie was on her way to Recovery. She stayed at the vet's yesterday and we received 4 phone calls during the day updating her status. Today, Leigh called to tell us to pick the little girl up. She was eating and feeling very well.
Here's a shot of Moxie's nicely shaved belly . . .
And a close-up of Leigh's stapling skills.
And a last shot of Moxie playing with her new Ellie toy.
17 weeks is much too young for a puppy to have to go through this type of ordeal yet Moxie handled every phase of it without complaint or fear. The vet techs are in love with her and the vet says she's one of the nicest puppies she's ever met. This from a breeder of Rotties and Dobes. We are very sorry she had to go through this but it showed us just what this little girl is made of. Ms. Moxie has plenty of moxy.
Jim