The Puppies.

The next morning Donna and I are out at the lakeside looking for an incredibly bad sarna dog when Donna tells me: the pregger dog had a pup this morning. At six am.

We finish what we’re doing - another horrific case we can’t bring in because we don’t have room for - and Donna drops Carissa and I off at Karen’s.

Instead of a birthing party, there are three incredibly exhausted females. Karen, who’s been up with the dog since six, Heidi, another Granada patron saint of the street dogs, and Preggers herself, nurturing four pups but still looking gigantically pregnant and stressed.

Another one was born dead, they tell us. It was awful. It came out with the sack but it was gone.

The puppies look like tiny, homely guinea pigs, blind and rooting around. Mom looks exhausted.

While we’re talking she starts to strain, pant, again. Another one is coming. Like the dead one, this one is still in it’s amniotic sack. Heidi doesn’t stop to think - as it comes out she pulls the sack open, pulls the puppy out. It’s gasping , not really breathing. We all hold our breath. Breathe.

Breathe.

Heidi rubs it’s chest. It’s chest heaves a few times, catches. It breathes.

There are a million street dogs, a billion street puppies, but in this one minute there is so much victory. Karen, Carissa, Heidi and I are between laughing and crying. Preggers is cleaning her new baby enthusiastically.

It was, unfortunately, the last victory of the evening. Time and time again she would start to labor again and time and time again, more stillborn puppies. It is a marathon that never ends - by the time all was said and done it would be twenty six hours. The five live ones. The one that died between numbers two and three. And then another stillborn. And another. And another.

It’s heartbreaking. We take turns digging the grave in the back of Karen’s garden for the stillborn ones.

I go home and pick up some stuff.

That night I sleep in the spare room outside of Karen’s house, within the locked courtyard, feet away from mother and babies. I have a yoga pad, a sleeping bag. I get up every hour to check on her while Karen and Heidi, who have been in with it since the beginning, get some much needed rest and Carissa gets a cab back to her hotel.

Sometime between four and six am the last one is born, a big one, also stillborn. And then, it seems, we are done. Five live ones. Seven dead. Mom - who is nicknamed Bolsita for the bag she had sticking out of her butt - is exhausted and stressed but fine.

It’s decided to go to the vet in the morning, Karen will get a truck and we’ll drive to Managua to make sure everything really is over, there is nothing left inside Bolsita that will kill her. Heidi has to do work stuff. Carissa stays to do clinic duty. We load Bolsita and the pups into the front of the truck and get halfway down the street. There is no air conditioning in the truck. The road is bad and rutted. It’s hot and Bolista is stressed, I’m struggling to keep the pups on the seat with her while Karen drives.

There is no way this is going to work. No way. We turn the truck around and go back to Karen’s.

Donna knows a vet that will come to the house, a decent one. He shows up and says he thinks it’s going to be okay, gives her an antibiotic shot for any infections from all the stillborn ones. Tells us to try to bottle feed the pups to give them extra help.

The surviving pups are so small, so fragile. There are two that we are smaller than the rest of the already way too tiny pups. From the get-go they have trouble latching on to a nipple, seem limper, less energetic then the rest.

We lose the first one a few hours after the vet leaves. One minute he is alive, wriggling with the others in the pile of naked-hamster looking babies. Then he is cold, gone.

The next day we lose another one, the other weak one. One of the stronger ones, one we called Little Hazel because it has the same markings as Karen’s pit bull, starts to get weaker. Heidi and Karen bottle feed frantically, warm them constantly.

I am at the clinic, working on the other sarna dogs. When Carissa, who is leaving, stops by to say goodbye to Karen she gets the news: Little Hazel is gone now, too. A bad blow for all of us, but for no one as much as Karen who has poured heart and soul into this. If there is any justice in the universe, they will survive just because Heidi and Karen, who have done so very much, deserve that.

At this writing, one is left. Heidi and Karen continue to labor around the clock trying to keep it going. Bolsita, though stressed, continues to do well. Eating, being a good dog mom. After twenty six hours of labor with not one bathroom break, Bolsita finally takes the worlds’ longest pee.

On Karen’s $5000 Turkish rug.

Highly disheartened over the pups, we take the pee as a good sign for Bolsita, carpet aside.

Karen is a saint.

To end on a slightly higher note: Tyson the ditch puppy is going to a new home very shortly. Like within the next few days. A good home, nice people out on the Laguna. This means we can probably squeeze one more into the clinic. Potato, Donna says, the horrible one out at the lakeside. A woman in Maine says if we can get him in and rehilibitate him, get the sarna taken care, of, she will take him, ship him to her home in the states.

The tourism people have been poisoning dogs out at the Lakeside. Potato hasn’t been seen in a day or two but we remain hopeful. Tomorrow we go out on a Potato hunt, to bring him in.

Tomorrow I also get another volunteer, to help since Carissa is leaving. Our first task: bath time for One Eye.

And because it would be disingenuous of me to not say anything: Carissa will be sorely missed. Sent over for a six day volunteer stint with her school, she had no idea what the hell she had gotten herself into. As her classmates read stories to school children, Carissa dug graves for the puppies with us, gently washed the infected amniotic fluid off of Bolsita, worked ten hour days with me. On her very first day we picked up One Eye. Two hours into this first day she finds herself standing next to the pick up truck with me trying to pass One Eye over to her from the bed, where I rode in the back holding the dog. She looks at One Eye - the gaping eye socket, the scabby, hairless, flaking skin, the smell. This is where most people would have made an excuse, backed away, called their advisor, done anything. I worked with career shelter workers who would have refused to touch this dog. Carissa hesitates for only a second, reaches up her arms, takes her, clutches her tight and places her carefully back on the ground, leads her into the clinic.

The girl can roll with it.

Godspeed, Carissa. Thank you for everything.

It would also be disingenous of me to point out something that kind of should be a given: I am not the clinic. I am not barely one tenth of a cog in the wheel that makes this run. I show up every now and again and get to play full time mangy dog wrangler for a while. What makes the clinic - what the clinic is - is an incredibly amazing and dedicated group of people who do this while holding down full time jobs and lives, the people who set this all up, make it run, do absolutely everything against overwhelming odds. Handle the main action of the clinic - spaying and neutering. Requistioning. Bringing in dogs like Quixote and Frida - half dead - and doing awesome work with them. Toni. Nick. Kit. Heidi. Karen. And of course Donna Tabor. And the amazing Dr. Tom who comes in often and just blitzkriegs these surgeries. I have the blog, I have the time, I get to tell the stories but it should never be assumed that they are just mine. Every single day here I am humbled and awed by these people.