Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Elsie's X-Rays: Definitely Six! :o)

Well here are the Elsie Girl's x-rays (or at least parts of the them). The first is the full view from her left side (you can see her hind legs and hips on the right side and vertebrae on the top). All the dark areas you see in the middle show air in her intestines. The pups are actually located at the very bottom center, the little hints of bright white.



To help see them better, I've take the x-ray above, cropped it, blown up the bottom center section and increased the contrast so you can actually see puppy heads and spines. That's the photo below. Again, the dark swirls are Elsie's intestines (center and center top left, below).

Beneath the dark swirls toward the bottom of this image you can see a few sorta round, white-edged circles (puppy heads) and jagged-looking, white, gently-curved lines (those are the beginning of the puppies' spines and ribs).



To help you find them, here are where some of the pups are located in the blown-up image:

1. You can see a puppy head bottom-most left corner (right above the black bottom edge, a blockish-looking circle) with a jagged white spine continuing from that head vertically and up toward the right (almost pointing at the one on a clock, or directionally NNE or whatever).

2. In the center bottom, there are actually THREE heads clustered together with a few spines pointing off to the right.

3. At the top right , there are actually two more heads (you can't see their spines because of where I cropped this image).

Those are the six for-sures. So we know Elsie will have at least six pups.

Now, as I'm looking at the x-rays more closely here, I think I see at least one more head, maybe two (but I'm no expert), so we're assuming six t0 eight pups. Last time we counted seven pups, and we ended up with nine.

At the very least, it will be six. And Elsie is due in about 10 days (toward the end of next week).

We'll bring the whelping box up this weekend, and will start checking her temperature mid-week next.

And we'll keep you posted.

So that's the deal here! I'm actually relieved. Six to eight pups will be manageable; I was afraid we were looking at a few more, and that felt a bit intimidating. But you never know. We'll see when she delivers!

Stay tuned. :o)

'Til next time, Joan

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow! It all happens so fast! Puppies again. How exciting! It seems not so long ago that Elsie just had her puppies. Man, the year went by so fast.

Meg said...

congratulations! Can't wait to see them!