Kasidi's puppies

March 1st

All of the puppies were checked this morning. Ridges are beautiful and hardly any fuzzing, eyes are opening and they all look fat.

Although I check the puppies for sinus I have infact never felt one. My first two litters were checked by Sharon Rossiter (Sonstraal) and Eileen Nelson(Zougani) and I watched very closely at how they carried out their checks. Fortunately I have never had a sinus in any of my litters but as I was checking the puppies this morning it reminded me of an incident that happened a couple of years ago when we lived in Scotland.

I received a phone call from a friend who had a litter of Ridgebacks at that time. She told me that her vet ( a South African locum) had detected a sinus in one of her puppies. As I had never felt a sinus before I asked if I could come over to see the puppy. She lived about an hours drive away but I felt It was worth the journey if I could get first hand experience of sinus.

When I arrived I took the puppy and examined It the same way I had seen my puppies examined and could not feel anything. I tried on several occasions and felt pretty stupid I have to say but I had to be honest and admit to not being able to feel a sinus.

I was a nurse working in a Dialysis Unit at the time and was well used to using my fingers to locate veins etc and took blood on a daily basis so I was very disappointed in myself as I drove home and thought to myself how can I ever be expected to find a sinus in my own puppies when I failed to find the one in my friends puppy.

A couple of days later I received a phone call from my friend to say she had taken the puppy to the vets for surgery and the vet failed to find the sinus. He had to admit to making a mistake. This was good news to my friend and for the puppy and I was just relieved that I did not pretend that I had felt something that was not there.

So with my own litter, I am very diligent and even though I have yet to find a sinus I am sure that when the time comes I will have no problem in detecting one.

Kasidi is eating huge amounts of food right now, she clearly needs lots of fuel to feed the little darlings. She went out in the snow with us yesterday and had a great time with the other dogs.

Hopefully later on today we will get individual photo's of the pups on the website.