Hopefully, most of you have never had the experience of treating a puppy, much less a litter of puppies for Parvo. It's devastating and exhausting with no way of knowing, who, if any will survive. They are in so much pain that they don't want you to even touch them but there is no way around it. First, you must inject them with antibiotics and anti-vomit meds. Next, you poke a huge needle under their skin in the back to give 100 CC's of fluids in order to prevent dehydration. The whole time they are screaming and fighting you.This time I used a product called ToxiBan which is basically liquid charcoal that coats their intestines to help them heal. This is the nastiest stuff you have ever seen because they hate the taste so the are spitting it out the whole time you are squirting it in their mouth and you have to give them 30 cc's. I think it did help but it is not a fun treatment. After just a few minutes they start vomiting it back up so it gets everywhere. I know I've gone through at least 200 potty pads!!
We use Tamiflu a lot of times but you have to catch it really early otherwise the Tamiflu doesn't do what it needs to do.
It's really amazing that Mathilda actually survived because I didn't start her treatment until she was 3-4 days in and that's hard to fight back from. I'm sure it's why Bianka didn't survive because she was too far gone by the time I got her started. Poor little girl, I felt so helpless and could do anything or tell her why she was dying. So sad!!!
As you can see in this picture (besides the dirty baseboards!) Mathilda has ringworm on all of her feet and her tail. She already had a compromised immune system just from that and I'll start treating it as soon as I'm sure we are completely out of the woods with the Parvo.
The shame of it all is that vaccinations can be purchased on the internet for so cheap and that's all it take to keep them from getting the deadly disease. Of coarse, the main thing that would prevent it would be for people to have their pets spayed and neutered. There is no excuse for people to not do this. Atlanta has done a great job providing low cost spay/neuter and in some cases it's free. Lifeline Animal Project has two locations now, there is Spay Georgia that give low cost certificates, West Mobile Vet covers most of the southwest part of metro. No excuses are available anymore, except people are lazy and then want the tax payers and rescue organizations to fix what they allowed to happen.
We have made a video of the treatment of these three puppies and will post it on YouTube so people can see how it's done and why we must insist on puppy vaccinations until we can stop people from having unwanted litters.
Michelle
