Last week rat Michelle dropped a precipitous amount of weight, and I wondered whether I should take her to the vet. But she was still active, and since her starting point had been . . . adorably obese, I hoped that she’d just bounce back. Nope. On Monday, her breathing was labored, and I made an appointment.
Turns out Michelle has a respiratory infection, quite common in rats. In fact, 10 years ago, my rat Allison died from one, but Michelle is living pretty successfully with hers. Now she needs twice-daily doses of two antibiotics, plus a supplementary diet of baby food, which is easy to swallow and therefore more likely to get down the gullet of a congested rat.
It’s not easy to dose a squirming rat with medication, particularly if you get emotionally involved with your perception of the rat’s suffering.* But John is mastering an immobilization technique, so daily we’re improving. (Thank you, man-who-can-be-replied-upon-to-help-in-any-situation.)
*There are real signs, naturally: squirming, increased heart rate, tightened muscles, widened eyes, peeing, and shitting.
Meanwhile, I have some reflections about my experiences with veterinary medicine.
First, I generally like taking my rodents in for vet care. Why? All of the benefits of the waiting room—i.e., cute animals and friendly owners—and none of the stress of having a sick dog or a cat. Rodents live for only a few years, and I’ve taken that in stride, slowly accumulating a rodent graveyard à la Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State.
Even better, vets take every animal seriously. So even if you show up with a dwarf albino hamster that is essentially an anti-social cotton ball with teeth, they’re going to talk to you about the care options as though it’s a Very Big Deal. I always loved the High Import with which my vet would discuss my hamster’s over-long teeth, which had to be clipped every few weeks to prevent her from starving. No matter how much I giggled, he never even cracked a smile.
Occasionally, I could get him to veer off-topic by asking questions about other people’s rodents. And once he told me a story about having flung a hamster who bit him across the room (It was a reflex!) right in front of the hamster’s entire human family, including children. (”Fluffy?”)
But that vet couldn’t see me Monday afternoon, so I was stuck with another office, where I’d had a not-great experience with gerbil Moomush a couple of years ago. This time, same deal. I could tell almost immediately that the doctor was a Science Vet, as opposed to an Animal Lover Vet. Witness the opening of the appointment:
Vet: Rat in a box?
Me: Yes, sick rat in a box.
Vet: How old is she?
Me: 15 months.
Vet: How old was she when you got her?
Me: 5 weeks.
Vet: How big was she then?
Me: [Hand gesture.]
Vet: Huh. So how big would you say she was at 3 months?
Me: [Another hand gesture.]
Vet: We’ve been thinking about when to tell people to get their female rats spayed. We know that when we spay dogs in time, they don’t get breast cancer, because breast cancer is related to estrogen. So we’re trying to figure out when to spay rats. Because rats get a lot of breast cancer. And maybe at 3 months they’d be big enough for it not to be microsurgery anymore.
Me: Huh.
Vet: So next time you get a female rat, don’t bond with her before 3 months. Then if something happens while she’s under the anesthetic, it won’t be as bad.
Me: Wait. You’re saying not to love her for 7 weeks?
Vet: Oh. Well. Right. Okay, scratch that.
Yep, that’s how it went. And it wasn’t just that she opened the appointment by bringing up something entirely unrelated to what was happening in the room—though it was that, too—it’s that she was, to put it bluntly, Talking Crazy Shit.
In other words, if putting a rat under anesthetic is life-endangering enough to discourage people from becoming attached (itself an insane idea: What person in possession of an open heart can control feelings of love for an animal in her care?), then what the effing eff is the point of spaying rats to prevent breast cancer?
Let’s maybe-kill this rat so we can make sure it doesn’t die later!
JESUS. H. SCHWARTZ.
And another thing [wood-scraping noises as I adjust my soapbox for better comfort]: Never once, as we discussed Michelle’s care, did the vet mention that we are dealing with a rat, and that rats basically live for two years, and that given the givens, we might want to consider whether to treat at all.
For instance: The vet mentioned that if Michelle doesn’t do well on antibiotics, she should come in for x-rays, even though good x-rays of rodents are notoriously hard to get, since rodents do not stop moving. And if we do get a good x-ray, then maybe it shows that we need to do surgery, which is itself pretty complicated (again with the anesthetic), etc.
Sigh. It’s exhausting, really.
I appreciate that they take rodents seriously, as I said. What I also want them to do is take quality-of-life, expenses, and death seriously as well. This vet never seemed to consider that I might not want to, or be able to, pay for certain interventions; that the risk-benefit ratio of said interventions might not pencil out in their favor; or that the most humane thing to do to a rat who is suffering may just be to put her down.
Can I get a little reality here, Vet-Bot?
Some warm human interaction would have gone a long way as well.
And . . . Today’s Tirade finito completo.