Sad times

I guess we've gotten off fairly lightly in terms of poorly people of late. Of course they always wait to get ill in batches.

One of the groups of baby boy mice started fighting so I was faced with the dilemma of separating them. I wanted to try to make sure I split off the right mice to minimise the risk of them being left on their own. Well I got it wrong. Arnie and Biffy were both guilty of attacking the others so I decided to split them off together and then separate them into singles if needed. The other 5 boys in the cage were clearly exhausted from being chased around so I wanted to get both the bullies out and give them a break. Well in the night Arnie attacked Biffy really badly, leaving Biffy with wounds to his backside and in shock. I had Biffy on a hot water bottle syringing him fluids but, when I got up at 3am to redo his bottle he'd passed in his sleep :(

Added to that, this week Harry, Fred and Robson came back to stay for their holidays. I noticed that Harry had a bit of a tummy on him and thought he'd just been enjoying the good life. However, when I handled him his tummy felt really hard. So he went to the vets last night and it looks like he has a tumour in his abdomen. He is having a scan on Tuesday to see exactly what is going on. It's too awful to contemplate that we might lose him. He is not much more than a year old and when he arrived he was terribly nervous and then became hormonal and aggressive. We had him neutered and he became the loveliest rat, the difference it made to him was really amazing. So he's really one of my special ones and I'm desperately praying for a miracle.

And finally I mentioned last time about Dexter who was here to see our specialist vet. Well the news wasn't good and it looks as though Dex's lumps are cancerous growths on his sebaceous glands. In the few days he was here new lumps developed and the existing ones grew so the poor lamb probably won't be with us much longer. He may not be one of my rats but I have gotten to know him over the years and he's a real sweetie so I couldn't help shedding a tear when the vet gave us the prognosis.

So all in all I'm rather :( at the moment and generally a bit frustrated as I just don't seem to be able to keep up with things. I'm trying to reduce numbers but it is yet to have any real effect. Still we should have about 9 mice going to homes soon so that will certainly help.

On a happier note we have three more rats going to their new home this weekend - Scott, Austin and Eoghan from the batch of babies that came in before Christmas.