Thu, 19 Jan 2006 19:52:49
Ratblogging - The Big Balbowski gets his revenge
I figured I’d set this story down for posterity...read on for the story of a determined rat and his stubborn ways.
*sigh*
We love them...right? Keep telling me that we love them and that even when they act up...we still love them. :)
I figured I’d update anyone who might be wondering about my big boy Balboa. The lump on his arm was a tumor, and unfortunately it’s cancer. Doubly unfortunate is that during the surgery, the doc discovered that while it had not attached itself to anything, especially not the lymph system under the armpit, etc...it was so far down into his tiny wrist that if she tried to remove it all, he would have lost the use of the arm as she would have had to remove virtually everything down there...not a lot of space in a ratty wrist.
She had to leave a tiny, half-pea-sized lump. It will grow back. Nothing to be done there. His age (he’s a month shy of his 2nd birthday) and his temperament led us, my wife, myself and the vet, to all decide that this was his last surgery. Two in a month is tough on any animal, human or rodent! We’ve all decided that since he’s spirited and playful and happy and mobile...let’s live it up while we can, because age may get him before the cancer does. Take that, cancer! Father Time will kick your ass!
So...why the big sigh?
HE’S A HORRIBLE PATIENT! Terrible. Willful. Spiteful and quite simply, the Worst. Patient. EVER.
Day of his surgery: Comes out of anesthesia like a champ, the doc said it took maybe 20 minutes to shake it off and started easting and drinking, pooping and peeing right away. What a trooper! That was around noon. He was behaving, not going after the incision. He was checked on at 1 and 2 and 3...fine, fine and fine.
I show up at 3:45. at 3:55, my name is called.
“Go ahead and wait in 3, and we’ll bring him right in, Jim”
“OK, great!”
4:00
4:05
4:10 - “Uhh...sorry to keep you waiting. You’re not going to believe what he’s doing back there.”
“Yes I will. I know him. He’s the worst. patient. ever. What’d he do this time?
“He ripped open the incision and bled all over the holding tank. They;re cleaning him up now and dressing him in a wrap.”
“I told you he was going to do it...never trust him. He’s always going to do exactly what you don’t want him to do during recovery. Every single time.”
“But he’s so cute though!”
“I know, I know...that freaking face. Can’t stay mad at him when he turns on the charm. If he was a human, he’d be a lady killer. Hell, he’d probably be a lady killer if I let him around rat ladies now!”
I had Tom with me to get his nose bump looked at, and the tech brought me some kale to treat Tom and keep him busy while we waited. A few minutes later in comes Balboa, trussed up tight, with a one-armed “shirt” (gauze & vet tape) pretty much immobilizing the arm with the incision...and wearing an Elizabethan collar. Oh. My. God. I wish I had thought to snap a pic, it was freaking adorable. But he was mad and I could tell.
I open the carrier to get him out. He JUMPS (!) off my hand, lands on the surgery arm like nothing was wrong, walks up to the carrier and starts rubbing the collar against the hard side. Before I could ever react...POP. Off comes the collar. The doc and I just looked at him and she said ‘Wow. Smart, isn’t he?”
“Way too smart. He figures out higher concepts all the time...he;s a lot smarter than his brothers and sisters. Insanely intelligent.”
I told her the story about the Carefresh and the medicine…
Sidebar: the Carefresh/medicine story. Donna, my wife, usually dispenses medicine. We mix it up in Boost or gravy or something, put it on a spoon and they lick it up. We’ve done this a million jillion times. When T was on various medicines every day after his accident, some days he wouldn’t want to drink it...so Donna would follow him around the tank with the spoon until he drank it all. Sometimes this took 15-20 minutes, but he always ended up drinking.
Not Balboa. He figured out some higher concepts. Somehow, he established in his head that Carefresh is absorbent. Then, he figured out that what was on the spoon was a liquid, like his water and his pee that could be soaked up by Carefresh. Further proving that this was a plan and not a coincidence, he STOPPED pushing the spoon away, which was his old way of refusing medication. No...he knew that it would just come back. He needed to eliminate the medication-laced liquid altogether. He ran into his little house where Donna could not see what he was doing. She put the spoon at the door of the house, and...he picked up a big piece of Carefresh in his mouth and spit it directly into the spoon.
He figure it out. Carefresh soaks it up...and then it goes away. He repeats this behavior whenever he’s feeling ornery...proving, in my opinion, that it’s not a fluke, that it’s a PLAN. Smart little jerk, ain’t he?
Back to the main story. So we’re marveling at the boy’s superior smarts, she looks at Tom-Tom’s nose, I pay up and get meds (Metacam and Baytril) and go home. Balboa is mad that he’s bandaged, but what’s a ratty to do? The mommydaddypeoples say stay bandaged and that’s the way it goes.
Unless…
That night he gets no meds...the vet gave him his doses for that day. Tuesday comes...time for us to medicate Mr. Man. We know from past history that he will NOT drink anything that has Metacam in it...we have to force that in him. Now, I have developed a technique for doing this, not unlike most people who have rodents. My wife holds them, I hold the head with one hand, using two fingers to gently pry the mouth, I slip the syringe behind the teeth and on top on the tongue and *squirt* and the ratties lick and swallow and we’re all done. Done it bunches of times with great success. But not with Balboa. Every time is a fight. He CLENCHES his mouth shut. He pushes the liquid out of his mouth with his tongue. He refuses to lick it off himself if it gets on his fur. He will sit there, spitefully, and wait until you clean it off or he is returned to his tank where he can rub it off onto litter or a towel.
Fun. So...we’re in for a treat. Donna gets him all set...I get the syringe, grab his head, and in a split second, he juts backward, shakes side to side for a half-second and *pop*…
He’s completely out of his bandages.
Oh, you little son of a ....
We’re floored. He thrashed around his cage earlier that day, tunneling under and through everything he could find, rubbing against the bars, the house, etc...I assumed he was itchy. HE WAS LOOSENING THE BANDAGES.
Smart. Frustrating, but smart.
It’s 8 PM, and our vet is closed. His arm is bleeding from all the damned movement. We’re a little worried...both because of a potential for gunk and waste matter to touch the wound, and for the incision itself, because he started in on it even as Donna was still holding him. We found a 24 hour vet who agreed to re-bandage him and said they could truss him up tight.
So we go. 2 hours. 200 bucks for an after-hours visit, bandaging and some new meds, a more concentrated Metacam so we can put a LOT less in him...make it easier on everyone, plus an external antibiotic paste to help with the incision, as the vet put it, “Just in case he escapes again. He’s VERY spirited.”
“Yeah...I know.” I tell her about all his previous escapes from bandaging, the Carefresh story, etc. We laugh at him, she picks him up and skritches him, and actually kissed him on the head (how many vets do THAT!?) and took him off to try to wrap him up.
About an hour later she comes out with a VERY angry Balboa and a big smile on her face. “This one...this one is not a fun patient. Adorable little guy, but what a bad patient! “ She proceeds to tell me he shucked the first bandage and struggled against the second so much they ended up sedating him a little...just enough gas to make him sleepy, but not enough to knock him out. They wrapped him up good, tight, but not too much, both arms trapped. He was awake and angry when I got him back...and I laughed at the look of him...fur all pushed up around his face, rocking and hopping, trying to get out of this damned infernal bandage. She tells me that they got the Baytril in him, but not the metacam...I should give him a little time to calm down then try it later. Plus, they had to re-close the incision, he in fact had ripped part of it open.
I paid...again...grr...we go home. We wait a bit. We go to Metacam him… it’s a .05ml dose, just a drop! This should be easy. Donna picks him up in a towel, gets him ready...I grab his head…
In less than a half-second, the little bastard pushes forward with his paws, scoots backward and slips the new bandages. DAMMIT! I didn’t notice there was no tape securing the back part to his body! SON OF A ....200 bucks. He just cost me 200 bucks for almost nothing. Sure, we got better, easier-to-dispense meds and a nice antibiotic paste, but come on...that’s not worth two hundred clams! I looked at him like he just stole my wallet...which of course he had.
We were just floored. We decided to just say screw it...we smeared the incision with the paste, which tastes so awful that he would likely leave it alone...the vet said they use it all the time for rodents that won’t stay bandaged and love to lick at incisions. Sure enough, he figured out how to get rid of that as well. He rubs it on his face, then rubs his face on the towel in the recovery tank.
So now he’s recovering, no bandages, we’re smearing the paste on him and checking the incision regularly...funny thing is, not that he’s no longer restricted by the bandage, he’s taking his meds off the spoon again like he never had a problem with it. I think he was angry about the bandages the entire time.
And that;s my boy. Ornery to the core. Stubborn as a mule and smart as a whip. He cost me a new camera bag with all this nonsense...I really needed that $200...well, *wanted* it anyway, no one *needs* a new camera bag. Still. I told him he needs to get a job. He looked at me and bruxed. I guess that was his way of saying “Daddy, this is my job...to be cute. Look at how cute I am!”
He is. And I love him...but he still needs to get a damned job. :)
Posted by JimK at 07:52 PM on January 19, 2006
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