Part 2: A Mother Dog With a Shattered Pelvis Tried to Stand Up Eleven Times After Surgery — We Brought Her Puppies In and She Finally Rested. Forty Minutes Later She Tried Again.

PART 2

I’m Shannon. I’m thirty-eight. I’ve worked nights my whole career because I like the kind of medicine that comes through the door after dark, and because I’m not great with people and I’m very good with the ones who are scared.

Fourteen years in, I don’t cry at work anymore. I want to be honest about that. It’s not that I stopped caring. It’s that you build a thing in your chest that holds it, and then you go home and unload it, or you don’t and it gets you in some other way.

So when I tell you what happened Friday night, understand it came out of someone who is very hard to move.

Nell — I’m going to call her Nell from here, because that’s who she is now — was about two years old. Forty-one pounds. Black and tan, a hound-shepherd mix, whip tail, one ear up and one ear folded over at the tip like it had been broken a long time ago and healed wrong.

She was thin. Not starved. Nursing-thin, which is different. Her ribs showed because everything she had was going out of her.

She had a white patch on her chest shaped like a thumbprint.

Two things I wrote in her intake notes that night that I did not understand at the time.

First: both front pads were torn up. Raw, split, one of them bleeding fresh. Her back pads were fine. I remember thinking that was strange and then not thinking about it again, because we had bigger problems.

Second: her chest and the underside of her neck were caked with mud, and her back was almost clean.

I wrote both those things down at 10:15 p.m. on a Thursday.

It took me twenty-eight hours to understand either one.

PART 3

Animal control picked up the call Friday morning.

Officer Dale Whitaker. Twenty-two years on the job, and the kind of man who says four words when two will do. He went out to East Admiral with the landscaping guy, who came back on his day off to show him where.

There’s a car wash out there that’s been closed since before the pandemic. Chain-link fence around it, the automatic bay doors rusted half down, weeds coming up through the concrete.

Dale found the puppies at 10:20 Friday morning.

Three of them. In a dry gap between the back wall of the car wash and a chest freezer somebody had dumped there years ago.

He called me at the house. Woke me up. I sat on the edge of my bed with the blinds still shut and he said, “Three pups. Plus the one she was carrying. Four.”

He said the mom had made herself a nest under that freezer. Cardboard, a car mat, insulation she’d pulled out of somewhere.

And he said the whole area had flooded Thursday afternoon.

I could picture it before he finished. Two inches of standing water in a concrete lot with no drainage. Three weeks of rain.

She’d been moving them.

That’s what I said out loud, sitting on my bed at eleven in the morning on four hours of sleep. She was moving them out of the water.

Dale said, “That’s what it looks like.”

So the story we all had by Friday afternoon was a good story. A clean one. Mama dog gets caught in a flood, starts carrying her puppies somewhere safer, gets hit crossing Admiral, holds on to the one in her mouth anyway.

Everybody at the hospital had the same reaction. That poor thing. She was just trying to save them.

We were right about that.

We were not right about what she was doing at 1:34 in the morning.

Because Nell kept doing it. All Friday.

Dr. Pham came in at noon and stood outside run 4 with his arms crossed for a long time. He’s not a soft man. He’s one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the state and he has a bedside manner like a filing cabinet.

He said, “She’s going to pull that plate.”

He wasn’t being dramatic. She had a strip of stainless steel screwed into her pelvis and every time she hauled her front end up and dragged her back half, she was putting load through hardware that needed six weeks of nothing.

We tried everything you try.

We changed her pain protocol twice. We ruled out a full bladder, ruled out nausea, ruled out neuro. We moved her to a run at the quiet end of the hallway. We put a towel over the front of the kennel so she couldn’t see the traffic.

She got up anyway.

Fourteen more times on Friday between eight in the morning and eight at night. Kayla, who works days, wrote each one down on a sticky note because after a while it started to feel like evidence of something.

And here’s the thing nobody could get past, the thing I kept coming back to on my drive in Friday evening.

She never once aimed at me.

A dog that’s stressed in a kennel aims at you. They want out, they want company, they want their person. They orient toward the human.

Nell never did. Not once.

Every single attempt, she put her nose past me, past the front of the run, down the hallway, at that exterior door on the east end.

Same door. Same direction. Fifteen hours.

I got in at seven Friday night. She’d been in that run for eighteen hours. Her eyes were sunk. She’d eaten nothing. Her gums were tacky.

She was going to die of trying.

That’s when Kayla called the foster.

Her name is Corinne Baird. She’s sixty-one, she’s fostered neonates and orphan litters for a rescue group in Broken Arrow for going on nine years, and she had Nell’s four puppies at her house in a whelping box in her spare bedroom.

Kayla put it to Dr. Pham like this: “What if we just show her.”

He said it wasn’t standard. He said there’s an infection argument, a stress argument, a liability argument.

Then he stood outside run 4 for another minute, watching a forty-one-pound dog try to stand up on a broken pelvis for the thirtieth time, and he said, “Call her.”

Corinne was there by 1:20 in the morning.

PART 4

She came in the back door with a plastic storage tote lined with fleece, held against her chest with both arms, and rain on her glasses.

I want to tell this part slowly because I’ve replayed it about four hundred times.

We didn’t put Nell on the floor. She couldn’t be moved like that. We opened the front of run 4 all the way and Corinne knelt down on the concrete next to me in her raincoat and set the tote down where Nell could see into it.

Nell lifted her head.

She didn’t bark. She didn’t whine. She didn’t scramble.

She went completely still.

Her nostrils moved. That was all. Just that flutter a dog’s nose does when it’s working through something.

Corinne reached in and lifted out the first puppy. Black, fat, furious about being picked up. She laid it down on the blanket against Nell’s chest, in the crook of her front legs, away from the hardware.

Nell put her nose on it.

Not a lick. Not yet. She put the tip of her nose flat against the top of that puppy’s head and she held it there, maybe two seconds, and then she breathed out, hard, through her nose, this long low sound.

Then she picked her head back up and looked at the tote.

Corinne got the second one. Brown, smaller, the runt. Laid it down next to the first.

Nose. Two seconds. Breath.

Head up. Looking at the tote.

Third one. Black with white toes.

Nose. Two seconds. Breath.

Fourth one — the one she’d been carrying in the road, the one with the scrape healing on its head.

Nell put her nose on that one and held it longer. Four seconds, five. Then she licked it, once, from the ear to the shoulder, hard enough to roll it over.

Four puppies. All four against her chest. Three of them already shoving at her, rooting, doing the only thing they know how to do.

And Nell put her head down on the blanket.

She let out a breath that went on and on and on.

And she closed her eyes.

Corinne started crying. Not loud. She just took her glasses off and pressed the back of her wrist against her eyes and stayed there on the floor.

Kayla had stayed late for this. She was standing behind us in the hallway with her hand over her mouth.

I didn’t cry. I told you. I don’t, anymore.

But I sat back against the wall of that run and I felt something come loose behind my sternum that had been locked down for about six years.

Dr. Pham looked at the monitor. Her heart rate had come down eighteen beats in under three minutes.

He said, quiet, “Okay.”

We wrote it in the chart. 1:31 a.m. — litter presented. Patient settled. Resting comfortably.

I thought it was over.

I thought we’d solved it.

PART 5

At 2:09 a.m., Nell tried to stand up again.

I heard it before I saw it — the scrape of a nail on a rubber mat. I came around the corner with a chart still in my hand.

Her chest was up off the pad. Four puppies sliding off her front legs into the blanket. Her back half dragging.

Nose pointed at that east door.

I said, out loud, to nobody, “No. No, you got them. They’re right here.”

I got her down. She let me, same as always. And she waited, and she did it again ninety seconds later.

I sat down on the floor of that run at two in the morning with a dog who had just gotten everything she’d been asking for, and I had nothing left. No theory. No protocol. Nothing.

And then I thought about the way she’d done it.

One at a time.

Nose down. Two seconds. Breath. Head up. Look at the tote.

Nose down. Two seconds. Breath. Head up. Look at the tote.

Four times. And after the fourth one, she’d looked at that tote one more time.

I’d seen it. I’d watched her do it and I’d thought it was tenderness.

I picked up my phone and I called Dale Whitaker at 2:14 in the morning on a Saturday.

He answered on the fourth ring.

I said, “Dale. How many were in the nest?”

He said, “Three. Plus the one she had. Four.”

I said, “How do you know that’s all of them?”

There was a pause on that line that I am never going to forget.

Then he said, “I don’t.”

PART 6

He met me out there at 2:41 a.m.

My shift lead covered me for forty minutes. I drove down Admiral with the wipers going and I did not once think about what I was going to say to Dr. Pham if I was wrong.

The lot was exactly what you’d expect. Weeds through the concrete, the fence sagging on the east side, the car wash bays black and open like missing teeth. Standing water still in the low corner by the road, two days after the rain.

Dale had a big flashlight. I had my phone.

We found the nest first, under that dumped chest freezer, and it was such a small dry space and it was so carefully made — cardboard, a rubber floor mat, a wad of pink insulation — that I had to stand up and walk a few feet away for a second.

Then we looked at the water.

You could see where it had come up. There was a tide line of silt on the concrete. It had risen into the nest. The cardboard was still soaked through and warped.

So she’d started moving them.

And then we looked at where she’d been moving them to, because that’s the part nobody had thought about. She got hit on Admiral, which means she was going across Admiral.

On the far side of that road there’s a strip of scrub and then a steel building with pallets stacked six high along the north wall. Dry ground under a lip of roof.

We walked over.

We went down that whole row of pallets with a flashlight, and we didn’t find anything, and I started to feel like an idiot at about the eighty-foot mark.

Dale found her.

He didn’t say anything. He just went down on one knee and put his arm into a gap between two stacks and made a noise in his throat.

She was maybe nine inches back in there, wedged in dry dirt against the building’s foundation. Tan. A hundred and eleven grams lighter than her siblings when we weighed her an hour later. Cold, but not the kind of cold you can’t fix.

Alive.

Fifth puppy.

She’d already carried four across that road. She was going back for the last one when the truck hit her.

I sat in the passenger seat of Dale Whitaker’s animal control truck at three in the morning with a puppy inside my jacket against my skin, and everything I had written down at 10:15 on Thursday night came back and rearranged itself.

Both front pads torn up. Back pads fine.

She’d been dragging herself under that fence. Belly down, pulling with her front end, over and over, because a dog carrying a puppy in its mouth can’t jump a fence, so she went under it. Four round trips. Eight crossings of that lot. The front pads did all the work.

Chest and neck caked in mud. Back clean.

Same answer. She went under things, not over them.

And that door. That east door at the end of our hallway.

I looked it up when I got back. The hospital is almost due west of that car wash. She had a plate in her pelvis, twenty-four hours of anesthesia and opioids in her, and four walls around her, and she still knew which direction that lot was.

But the part that took the wind out of me was the counting.

Because she didn’t settle when we brought her puppies.

She settled when we brought her four puppies, and she checked each one with her nose, and then she looked at the tote for the fifth one, and it wasn’t there.

She gave us thirty-eight minutes.

Thirty-eight minutes of lying still with her babies against her chest, after twenty-eight hours of trying — and then she got up and started aiming at that door again, because the number was wrong, and she knew the number.

She wasn’t restless. She was never restless.

She was unfinished.

I had spent two days telling a dog that whatever it was could wait.

She was the only one in that building doing math.

PART 7

We brought the fifth one in at 3:40 in the morning.

Corinne was still there. She’d fallen asleep in a plastic chair in our lobby with her coat on, because she hadn’t been able to make herself drive home.

I warmed the puppy up first. Twenty minutes, towel, incubator, because you don’t put a cold neonate on a dog and let her feel that.

Then I opened run 4.

The other four were piled against Nell’s chest, asleep. Her eyes were open. Her head was flat on the blanket. She was looking at the door.

I knelt down. I said, “Hey, mama.”

She didn’t look at me. She has never once looked at me at the important moments, and I’ve made my peace with that.

I put the fifth puppy down in the crook of her front leg, against her chest, next to the other four.

Her head came up.

She put her nose on it. Flat. The tip of her nose on the top of its head.

And she held it there a long time. Longer than any of the others.

Then she breathed out.

She looked at the tote, and the tote was empty, and she looked at it for about three seconds.

Then Nell put her head down on the blanket and she slept for nine hours and twenty minutes without moving.

She never tried to stand again.

Not that night, not the next day, not once in six weeks of crate rest.

The plate held.

Here’s what I do now, and I’ve done it on every single one since that April.

Any mother who comes out of anesthesia in my recovery room, I get down on the floor where she can hear me, and I put my hand flat on her shoulder, and I tell her the number out loud. “All six, mama. Six. That’s all of them.”

Kayla thinks I’m being sentimental about it. Maybe.

But I’ve watched four of them go quiet when I say it. I don’t have an explanation for you and I’m not going to invent one.

There’s a laminated sheet taped inside the cabinet above our recovery station now. Dr. Pham approved it in May. It’s a protocol for presenting neonates to a post-op dam, with the infection-control steps listed out.

Somebody, and I don’t know who, wrote one line at the bottom in ballpoint pen.

Count them for her.

PART 8

Corinne adopted Nell in June. All five puppies placed by August. She kept the runt.

Nell limps on the right hind. She’ll always limp. She goes up stairs like she’s thinking about it first.

I went out to Broken Arrow in October to see her.

She’s got a bed in the hallway outside Corinne’s bedroom, and Corinne told me that every night, before she lies down, Nell walks the length of that hallway.

The runt’s bed. The cat. The spare room where the fosters go.

She puts her nose on each one.

Then she comes back and lies down in the hall where she can see the front door, and she sleeps.

Corinne said, “I’ve never taught her that.”

I said, “No. Somebody else did.”

She counts them.

Then she sleeps.

Follow this page for more stories about the ones who keep going back — long after the rest of us would have stopped counting.