On January 25th, Great Lakes Shiba Inu was very happy to welcome Takara to the world !!

Takara is a wonderfully healthy, sesame little girl.

Mika went into labor about 4pm on Friday evening and my 6pm we had a little girl.

Now..  unfortantely, it wasn't all good news.

Mika is an older lady and she seemed to be very tired, in fact, exhausted following Takara's delivery.

She didn't really want to push anymore.   I had been forewarned that this might be an issue and isn't uncommon with older dogs.

So we placed a quick call to our vet and confirmed the condition and he recommended that we wait till the morning and double check how things were.  I wasn't particularily comfortable with this, so we gave Mika several Tums pills (a good source of Calcium).

This didn't result in any further contractions..  so in the morning we went to the vet and we had Mika X-Rayed.  This confirmed the presence of one additional puppy, so he gave Mika a shot of Oxytocin, which we were expecting.

However, this didn't result in contractions and on Sunday we had to make the call on C-Section. 

9 year old females are a 50/50 success proposition when it comes to C-Sections..  so we made the call not to pursue the C-Section.

Our logic was..  we don't know if the puppy is alive anyhow, we don't know if Mika will survive the delivery, we risk the well being of Takara if we lose Mika in the C-Section.

So the decision was made, Mika got a shot of pencillin and we started her on oral antibotics while we waited out nature's natural course.

It is said..  but it is how it goes sometimes.