Sunny’s 17th week of life started out great. He was learning new things in training and showing a lot of interest in his world.

Of course there was also time for normal puppy shenanigans such as barking and biting, biting, biting – did I mention the biting? Sunny is definitely a normal Golden Retriever puppy who wants to mouth everything and with him teething, it’s extra biting. Most of the time he is pretty good at keeping his little love nips gentle, but every once and awhile he pretends he’s a Border Collie and nips our legs to herd us.

My job is to find new ways to occupy his quickly growing puppy mind. One way is de-squirreling a tree (which is always better done in a tunnel)….

Sunny perfers de-papering the bathroom (note the “WHAT? look:)….

The week started off great, but on Tuesday morning we noticed Sunny wasn’t his usual sunny self in the morning. While curled up on my lap, as I checked my e-mail (part of his morning ritual-until he no longer  fits-which is going to be pretty soon:), I noticed Sunny was shivering, as if he had fever chills. We took his temperature and sure enough, our little guy was running a temperature of 103.7F-not good. We whipped him over to the vets and they quickly ran a series of tests: blood and urine work, x-rays, fecal tests-the works, as we hunted for the cause of Sunny’s sudden illness.

All his tests came back fine, except his bloodwork- Sunny’s white blood cell count was up-signs of an infection. Our vet thought it was a viral infection and started antibiotics while keeping  Sunny at the clinic on an IV drip all day. His temperature finally broke and that evening Sunny was back home with us. The next day, he passed a recheck, and they removed the catheter for his IV (the bandage). Our poor little guy was pretty wiped out and promptly crashed out  as soon as he got home.

I was terrified Sunny had somehow picked up distemper, which is unfortunately around in Los Angeles more than it should be. Having nursed  4-week old foster puppies Ben & Jerry to their eventual loss to distemper, we had seen first hand how horrible the disease is and it is something I worry about for all puppies..

Despite Sunny having all his shots, it takes some time for a puppy’s body to become completely immune and I had overheard a man saying his dog hadn’t had any shots when we were at the vet for Sunny’s last DHPP shot. All night I worried and kept watch over Sunny, carefully looking for any sign of distemper. Other than the lethargy and fever, Sunny had not shown any of the typical signs which include diarrhea, vomiting, running eyes and nose, and hardening of the nose and foot pads.

Fortunately, the next morning Sunny was feeling much better and he announced that fact very loudly!

So it seems Sunny had picked up some sort of canine 24 hour flu, which is interesting because I had the human version the week before. We are so relieved our little guy is better and back to being his normal little ray of light.