Just about two weeks ago, our neighbor's dog had puppies. A dozen in all, but one was stillborn. My children and his great grandchildren have been keeping an eye on the puppies, which isn't easy, as they're nestled under a porch. This morning, they came back in to tell us one of the puppies was dead.

We went out to take a look, and he wasn't dead, but he was very close to it. He's a runt, and he obviously hadn't been getting any milk. There was no discernible breathing, and very little movement. I was ready to write the little guy off. But I thought back to something my instructor said in our First Responder training. He told us that if you ever arrive on a scene where the patient is a baby, even if the baby is obviously dead, you STILL perform CPR. You want the parents' last memory to be you trying to revive the child, even if you knew there was no hope. And so, with the help of the neighbor, we prepared some warm milk. It's not the best for dogs, but it might certainly keep him from starving until we can get him some formula. He was so far gone, he had no swallow reflex. We had to massage his throat to get the milk to go down. At one point, he actually stiffened up and we were positive he was dead, but with a few efforts to revive him, he came back weakly.

After  little more than an hour, he apparently woke up crying. Obviously, the crying's a VERY good sign. Within two hours, he was taking deep, regular breaths, lifting his head, and opening his eyes. He's still a long way from being out of the woods, but the little fellow wants to make it, and it would be wrong of us not to try to help him along.

But he's gonna need your good thoughts and prayers. He's very weak, and whether he makes it or not depends on a lot of things. But when we first got him, I'd have given him less than a 10% chance of making it. Now I'd say he's probably at 50/50, but with a lot of hope because he WANTS to make it.