Poor Rat Baby

(...some women become Cat Ladies. Apparently I've become a Rat Lady...)

Today was a rough day for the rat babies. I'd made an appointment at the vet for 1630, and since I get off work at 1600 I just brought them in to the office with me. They sat on one corner of my desk (next to the printer, for extra warmth) while I dealt with the day-to-day minutia of my job. The thing is, their "mobile home" isn't that big- it's just a plastic storage thing we drilled holes in. So there wasn't much space for running around and the like, which meant they ended up spending most of the day taking rat naps.

Once we got to the vet and situated in our little waiting room, I let them out so they could crawl around on me. They eventually settled down, one on each shoulder, and took yet another nap while I read (hey, I'm not complaining- the cats are never so well-behaved at the vet!) Everyone was so impressed by how sweet my rats are- they got lots of compliments on their nice manners. Guess there's hope for us as people-who-rear-things yet... Anyway, eventually the doc showed up (he'd been delayed due to- and I quote- "a rabbit emergency"), and took a look at Camilla.

Camilla was the reason we were there (Zelda was just along for moral support): it was time to grind her teeth down again. But this time they were even worse than the first time we had to do it. One of her upper incisors had actually curled so far around that it was growing back up into her palate. Poor little thing. So the vet recommended that we just remove her incisors, since she's not able to actually chew with them, and they cause her pain. But not until after she'd recovered from today's procedure, which turned out to be a) trimming the teeth and b) extracting the tooth from where it had punctured her mouth. He wants to make sure she's healed up and infection-free before he operates on her.

Oh my expensive "free" pets. ::sigh::

They actually let me come back and watch the procedure (Zelda, too- who stayed meekly on my shoulder the entire time) which was pretty neat, but also a little difficult because it's hard to see a creature scared and confused, even if it's for its own good (the knock-out gas makes them stagger around, and they don't understand what's going on). But watching is how I discovered that rats have molars! Who knew? Not me! But discovering that made me feel much better about taking away her incisors, and that maybe we won't have to re-name her "Gummie", after all...

Afterward they gave me ("gave me"- pfft, I paid for it...) two little phials of medicine- one is an antibiotic, the other a pain-killer, so tonight I had the interesting experience of administering drugs to a rat. A rat who was not thrilled with being wrapped in a hand towel and having a syringe thingy shoved in her mouth. She squeaked so pathetically- I felt really guilty, especially because that's all she did: didn't try to bite me or anything, just looked at me like, Why?

And I have to do it twice a day for the next two weeks. Oh brother.