| | Backstory: Upon noticing their neighbor's house was on fire, two teenage kids broke inside to rescue a litter of 10 pitbull puppies. Said puppies were brought to where I work as the house proceeded to burn to the ground, with momma and papa doggie trapped inside.
The puppies arrive, work comes to a grinding halt to triage them. Ones with only a few burns and healthy suckling reflexes get put into the oxygen incubator while the others are examined more closely. After determining only one to be in real danger, the others are given numbers (written on tape taped around a leg), antibiotic shots, burn cream is applied, the soot is wiped off, they are fed, and their temps/heart rates/respiration rates are recorded. It takes literally 6 people two hours to organize all of this.
I was responsible for Five. Five was the one who wasn't doing very well. Her color was practically nonexistent (she was tan colored in her gums, as opposed to bright pink) and she was barely breathing, her breaths were cries of pain. I sat with her, stimulating her to breathe and move and stay alive while hooked up to a personal oxygen mask for 3 hours. About hour 2.5, she started breathing much more slowly. We intubated, the doctor tried to bring her out of it, but she was gone. I was warned that she almost certainly wouldn't make it, so I wasn't too upset, just drained. Oddly enough, it is one of my favorite things to spend hours sitting with an animal destined to die. Comfort caring is my job, after all.
Midway through all of this, we found out that the daddy dog did in fact survive the blaze - he had somehow broken a second story window (or it broke some other way), jumped onto the porch roof, and then to the ground and ran away. The firefighters found him, walking all on his own. His poor balls were scorched almost completely off, one leg was badly burned, and the pad on the foot of that burned leg was falling off from jumping from a two story window. When I left he was still being worked on, but obviously happy to see his babies were alright.
All in all, not a horrible day. 10 saves out of 12 (assuming none took a turn for the worse since I left) in a house that burnt to the ground when no one was home. RIP Puppy No. Five, I'll always remember you! |
| | Posted 2/25/2008 8:22 PM - 91 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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