On Monday, my brother came over to see me, and bring me cheese from Mars Cheese Castle in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (If you’ve never been there before, and you’re local, trust me, you need to go.) When doing so, he also brought along his girlfriend, Dana, and his friend Andy. He is absolutely enamored with my animals, and spent a solid twenty-minutes holding one of my ball pythons. Absolutely lost his mind over Gideon, and his big bright eyes, and love of popcorns. He also really seemed to like the rats.
How can you not? It’s like having a cage of tiny, lovable puppies.
So, while trying to explain the names of all of my girls, and their genes/what they’re called, I went to collect Chai. She’s a dumbo rat, who is also a rex, with curly little whiskies and fur. That just means that one of her parents was a hairless rat- at least, that’s what I was told. When getting her out however, we found something that made my heart stop. For a moment, I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe. I just could not.
There was some kind of big, black, bubbly mass on her side.
It wasn’t there before. But, in the past week- week and a half she’s been very shy and moody. If you come with snacks, she’ll rush up to you, snatch it and run away. That’s just not like her. So, sometime in the past 7-10 days this mass has appeared. My little brother is always in their cage, and he didn’t notice it. Neither have I, even though I spend a lot, if not all of my free time with my girls.
My anxiety is sitting at a solid billion out of 10.
As I type this, I’m sitting at my desk, a day and a half post-op, with a sleepy rat in my lap. My DRG placement surgery was Wednesday, and I am honestly in so much pain. While I was doing that, at 9:30am little miss Chai was having an appointment at the Round Lake Animal Hospital. Clearly, I don’t care much about my own surgery. All I care about right now, is my curly baby getting better.
Currently, she is living in “baby jail” where I can monitor her food, water, pooping, and everything else. I can also monitor the wound on her side, which looks really bad today because someone decided to be a difficult rat and pick at it. If she keeps this up… she will 100% get the cone of shame.
-Sky
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