Unity

Unity continued to worsen day by day. Millie called me this morning and said she didn’t feel good continuing, her quality of life was negligible and her neurologic behavior continued to disintegrate to the point where she didn’t want anyone to touch her without screaming and biting…so very, very far from the lovely girl that she was.

We all just feel like we have been kicked in the gut and are just horribly sad. We thank Jenn for taking care of her for 4 months only to lose her this way. We thank Millie for stepping up and taking on a distemper dog keeping her in isolation but in the end distemper won as it almost always does.

We continue to hold on to the hope that we won’t lose any others but we know that we have little to no control over that.

Rest In Peace unity we are so very sorry to have failed you

---

It’s going to take me bit to tell the whole story, but I will fill you in on all of it, and what we face because of it.

We rescued Unity way back on January 7th, she is a lovely perfect sweet adorable little Chihuahua that we love dearly. She came from the streets in the valley very pregnant and heart worm positive. She went to stay with Jenn and in a few weeks she delivered 7 healthy Chihuahua puppies. All was well, they were all adopted to their new families on March 27th with the exception of Upbeat who was with Jenn for another week as his family was flying in from Wisconsin and that was the soonest they could get here.

Upbeat was adopted on April 3rd and about 10 days later his family told us that he was ill with what appeared to be an upper respiratory infection, you need to remember a URI is a very common thing that can happen in pups and adults and we felt like he must have caught something while traveling through an airport. A couple of days later Unity came up with a snotty nose and goopy eyes, she had been scheduled to have her heart worm treatment and it was cancelled because she wasn’t feeling well. In the next few days Upbeat continued to worsen and so did Unity, Upbeat was hospitalized and the vet staff was suspicious of distemper but we just knew that couldn’t be possible unless he contracted it at the airport, but now Unity was worsening and showing neurological symptoms of slight twitching which also looked like Distemper. Unity was immediately hospitalized at Blue Pearl in Lewisville where they have neurologists on staff and they said the same thing it looks like distemper. Tests begun for both Upbeat and Unity but the results from a distemper test take 3 to 5 business days and we knew it wouldn’t be until well into next week that we would know.

None of us, and I mean none of us could even begin to grasp how Unity could come down with distemper, she has been at Jenn’s house for 3.5 months, never gone anywhere publicly to have picked it up, we were all in a state of shock second guessing every single thing knowing how devastating a diagnosis like this is. To say we were sick in the pits of our stomach is an understatement. After just a few days Upbeat passed away and the pain we felt for this family was just too much. Jeff Caponera and his family are long time clients at Lone Star Dog Ranch, Jeff was the chief of police in Anna and him and his wife are just lovely, lovely people who have now lost their new pup to what appeared to be distemper and we have no way of knowing how that happened. Unity was hospitalized with what appeared to be the same and we just didn’t know if she could survive this if that is what the test results show.

The incubation for distemper from the time they come into contact with it is approximately 3 weeks before symptoms would appear. Dr. Reno tried doing some sleuth work to see if it was possible that one of the dogs that came in from the Easter auction group may have been exposed and somehow it got to Jenn’s house. I’m going to talk about the science a little bit here so you can understand all details, distemper is not a hearty virus, it doesn’t live long on surfaces, or outside for more than a couple of hours. It is typically transmitted from direct contact with droplets just like covid would. Many dogs can get distemper and carry it without ever getting sick with it, or some will have mild symptoms but nothing that would ever make you think they had distemper. Dogs that are vaccinated for distemper have very little risk of every becoming ill with it. The problem is Unity came from the street 3 and a half months ago and we couldn’t vaccinate her because she was pregnant and then she was nursing pups so we wait until the mama has weaned her pups before vaccinating her. Unity had her first vaccine about 3 weeks before becoming ill, but she did not have her second booster because she wasn’t well.

Puppies are vaccinated at 6 weeks and at 8 weeks but no puppy is protected from any illness until they have their complete set of vaccines which generally is about 4 months old so they are always vulnerable to illness until then.

We don’t have test results and we won’t until next week sometime but with all of that being said everything points to this being distemper and all we can think of is maybe KISS who was at the sanctuary with the Easter group brought it to Jenn’s on her foot, or maybe the mama dog Easter and her pup Peeps brought it to Jenn’s and somehow that is what happened. It is a stretch, an absolute stretch, a long shot but nothing else makes sense…. but seriously we are just in shock that this could even happen, KISS and Easter never had any signs of illness and still don’t and all of them were bathed before ever going to Jenn’s so it doesn’t seem possible, but maybe just maybe KISS or Easter are dogs who have had distemper and absolutely no symptoms.

We simply just don’t know, and we clearly will never know which makes it all so much worse, and so much more painful and no matter how hard we try not to we blame ourselves.

When something like this happens your brain just scrambles, obviously we are terrified for the pups that are currently with Jenn, she keeps mama dogs and their babies in separate rooms to be quiet and peaceful but the mama dogs go out to the backyard to potty. So now we are terrified for the safety of Orbit’s Dachshund babies and KISS’s Bordeaux babies at Jenn’s house, they’re babies, they’re not vaccinated and they are vulnerable to clearly some kind of danger and we just don’t know if they might get sick. In addition to that we have two Pom’s that are very pregnant with puppies due in about 10 days that we cannot send to Jenn because we have to be as cautious as possible, and that breaks her heart. Karla and Christi have stepped up to take a mama to their home and try and fill Jenn’s very important job and raise a litter at their house. We are beyond grateful for them to raise their hand and say they will do their best. We have ordered two whelping pens one for Karla and Extra and one for Christi and Dubble Bubble and we will all meet next week with Jenn for a tutorial and discussion on what to do and how to do it.

Unity was released from the hospital and of course who stepped up to take care of a dog with potential distemper? That would be Millie because she is an absolute gem. Millie has an isolation room and in addition an isolation yard and Unity is now in her care. We don’t know if Unity will survive, if she does have distemper some dogs can survive it with varying degrees of deficits such as tremors, twitching and weakness but for many others the neuro symptoms worsen and they cannot survive it. We just don’t know and it all falls into the gigantic painful category that we are looking at. Millie will take care of her for as long as we think she isn’t suffering, if she survives this she can shed this virus for several more weeks and Millie knows this and is in it for the long haul hoping to save her life. We will get test results back next week so we don’t know for sure, but it seems like the script is already written and we have nothing left to do but pick up the pieces and figure out how to move forward.

So here we are just completely stressed out, sad, confused and in shock. We know full well that many rescues face distemper, and maybe we’ve just been lucky but that doesn’t make it any easier. We have 7 beautiful new puppies that we might lose, we have newborn Bordeaux pups for the fist time in the rescues history and the thought of losing them just crushes us. The Caponera family has been just lovely thanking us for doing all we could knowing that we had absolutely no way to have known what was happening, we paid all of Upbeats medical bills and returned their adoption fee as we didn’t want expenses to be added to their pain. All of the families of Unity’s pups have been notified and thus far all of them are healthy. All of the families that are waiting for Orbit’s pups have been notified of what “might be” and thankfully all of the Bordeaux pups don’t have families so nobody to notify there.

I will say this event has made me want to close the door, the stress from something like this and the personal responsibility that we feel with all of our rescues, young and old, and all of our families who have adopted or are waiting for a pup can just be overwhelming, and overwhelmed is too small of a word. All of this has been happening at the same time I am fighting to save Bessie’s eye and I have cried more times than I care to talk about. We hope that this gives all of you enough details as to what we are going through, it’s not something we cannot share. We all love our babies at maternity manor and love watching them grow but for the foreseeable future I will be sharing them with a heavy heart of fear and worry, but now we will all feel the worry together, and believe it or not that makes us feel better to have the power of the village behind us with offering prayers and positive thoughts for not only Unity, but for the puppies that are born and for the family of Upbeat who lost their baby after only being able to love him for a couple of weeks.

---