The deed is done!
The awesome Bekka met me Sunday night to do another blood draw. I drove that sample to my repro vet Monday morning first thing and also sent some of the same sample to the IDEXX reference lab. I got the call about 10:30 that it was 10.9 per my repro vet’s machine and 10 per the reference lab, so we needed to breed Monday night into Tuesday for ideal timing. Thanks to my awesome co-worker and friend Caroline, I booked it out of work, ran home, threw some things into a bag, and Zhora and I hit the road for Massachusetts!
Ollie’s owner Kat had come up with an awesome plan for a location. I was asking if she had a quiet room at her house or, failing that, we should probably do it in my motel room. She had a better idea. We met at her campsite, out in the country and very quiet. Plus! We stayed there!
Now Zhora is a strong-willed dog with a lot of personality, and that, plus her being more mature than Ollie, meant that I think he found her a little intimidating. She snarked at him a bit (as many do), and he took it personally (she also snarked at Bert, but Bert is experienced and comfortable being assertive). He was very interested, but very polite. So we didn’t get a natural breeding Monday night. I’d made an appointment for Tuesday afternoon with a local repro vet as a backup plan, and I was VERY glad I did! Tuesday morning we drove the dogs over to Kat’s training center, where they could run around together and have some room. Zhora was very flirty and I think if Ollie had been a tad bit less polite they’d have managed a natural, but this is his first time being bred and I REALLY didn’t want her to put him off the whole idea so….off to the repro vet we went!
We showed up at Slade Veterinary Hospital in Framingham, where we met with Dr Gatlin. She and her staff (all breeders) talked us through what was going to be done. Kat commented that this was the weirdest thing she’s ever done in the dog world. Poor Ollie was horrified, then thrilled, then horrified again, then he wanted a sandwich and a beer. His semen was excellent (92% motility (“are they moving?”) with over 88% progressive motility (“are they going somewhere?”), it was also a large sized sample for a smaller breed, so yay Ollie. We did a vaginal insemination and then I agreed to take part in a study which required a blood draw, so I decided to run another progesterone while we were there to decide if we needed to try a second breeding the next day. The progesterone came back at >20, which made me panic until I asked if it was an IDEXX in house machine, which it was. Dr Gray had told me (and others on my repro groups also said) that the IDEXX in house machines can be very inaccurate with the higher numbers.
I emailed Renee and Dr Gray with the details, and Renee sent me a pregnancy calendar (due date is August 11), and Dr Gray said not to worry about that progesterone number at all, that she’s seen colleagues report >20 on the in house with reference lab numbers closer to 7. So we should have been comfortably in the window (Tuesday would have been day 2-3, which is well within the ideal window).
So now we wait. I have some planning and thinking to do, but first we will see if she’s pregnant or not. That will be around July 7th.
I am so grateful to Kat for all her help, for her hospitality, and her company. We had an awesome time talking dogs dogs dogs for a day and a half!
