Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Tink died tonight
She died in my hands.
I can't stop crying.
She shouldn't have died. She was getting better. I thought so, anyway.
Then, tonight, I found her hunched in a little ball, and kind of swaying, or heaving, as if her breathing was labored. But she wasn't making any noise, no wheezing. When I picked her up, she bit me viciously, several times. So she must have been feeling really bad.
Then she just sat, all hunched up, with her eyes closed, and her body heaving in that weird way. I stroked her little head for a while. She was making her clicking noise, really really faintly. Maybe I should have put her back in her cage. I don't know. She hadn't eaten her food, or drank her water, for a day. I put some tofu near her, and some water, but she turned her back on them. It was the first time I've seen her uninterested in fresh scents. And when she did that, I noticed she wasn't using her hind legs. She was dragging herself forward with her front legs, only. I tried to drop some chicken broth down her throat, but she wasn't swallowing. Then she made a funny gurgling noise, and opened her mouth really wide, like she was gasping for breath, and her good eye went really big. And that's how she died. She stopped moving after that, and went limp, and wasn't breathing.
I closed her eye, and her mouth, and curled her up in her favorite sleep position. I've wrapped her up in soft tissues.
I've cried and cried, and still can't stop. Maybe I killed her. Maybe I made her choke. Maybe the chicken broth went into her lungs and she couldn't breathe. Maybe my handling her when she was so ill made her have a heart attack. Maybe if I had just left her alone. Maybe if I had noticed earlier, and gotten her to eat earlier.
God, I miss her so much already. The apartment is so quiet. I'm going to bury her up in the wilderness at the end of Lake Ave, with her favorite rock. It's really beautiful there. It's a good place for her.
So, this is the end of the blog. There isn't much point to it, without Tink.
I can't stop crying.
She shouldn't have died. She was getting better. I thought so, anyway.
Then, tonight, I found her hunched in a little ball, and kind of swaying, or heaving, as if her breathing was labored. But she wasn't making any noise, no wheezing. When I picked her up, she bit me viciously, several times. So she must have been feeling really bad.
Then she just sat, all hunched up, with her eyes closed, and her body heaving in that weird way. I stroked her little head for a while. She was making her clicking noise, really really faintly. Maybe I should have put her back in her cage. I don't know. She hadn't eaten her food, or drank her water, for a day. I put some tofu near her, and some water, but she turned her back on them. It was the first time I've seen her uninterested in fresh scents. And when she did that, I noticed she wasn't using her hind legs. She was dragging herself forward with her front legs, only. I tried to drop some chicken broth down her throat, but she wasn't swallowing. Then she made a funny gurgling noise, and opened her mouth really wide, like she was gasping for breath, and her good eye went really big. And that's how she died. She stopped moving after that, and went limp, and wasn't breathing.
I closed her eye, and her mouth, and curled her up in her favorite sleep position. I've wrapped her up in soft tissues.
I've cried and cried, and still can't stop. Maybe I killed her. Maybe I made her choke. Maybe the chicken broth went into her lungs and she couldn't breathe. Maybe my handling her when she was so ill made her have a heart attack. Maybe if I had just left her alone. Maybe if I had noticed earlier, and gotten her to eat earlier.
God, I miss her so much already. The apartment is so quiet. I'm going to bury her up in the wilderness at the end of Lake Ave, with her favorite rock. It's really beautiful there. It's a good place for her.
So, this is the end of the blog. There isn't much point to it, without Tink.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Easter...Tink's Bloody Sunday
Happy Easter!!
Tink got her Easter dinner early...boiled egg and fresh baby broccoli...yum!
The good: she's back to her old sluggish self. I guess that's good? And the lump under her chin is gone! Yay!The bad: her bad eye appears to be bleeding. Every morning, as I said earlier, I
take a q-tip and some sterile eye irrigating solution, and wipe the gunk off from around her eye. Today, it was crusted over, so it took almost 15 damp q-tips. Then I noticed that the q-tips were turning brown-ish. Then red. Which freaked me out a little. Once she could open her eye, she did, and I could see why it was bleeding -- there was a bloody sort of blister on the surface of her eye. The eye itself is even smaller than it was two days ago, so I'm thinking that I was right in thinking that the layers are sloughing off. Maybe this is some inner part of her eye? It looks disgusting, anyway.
And I saw her scratch at it with her little nails, and smear blood all over her nose. That must be why her eye was so crusty. I'm at a loss here, but I think I'd better not intervene. I'm going to just leave her be and let nature, and her instincts, take their course. If she thinks she should scratch at it...well, maybe she should. Maybe that's part of the process of getting rid of the degenerating eye... Anyhow, I can't think of a way to stop her from doing it. And I can't think what else I could do -- there's no medicine to put on it, besides her drops, which I DID apply, but I'm not even sure if I should be doing that. It's one thing to put them in a regular sort of eye, but should they be put in a bleeding, open-wound of an eye? And the ointment is just a kind of artificial tears, like her drops are, so I don't see any point in putting more on, and making her all greasy all over again. I don't know. I'm going to look "eyes" up on the web and see what I find.
After I lay down for a bit. Still feeling awfully sick. (And no worries -- I am very very very carefully washing my hands before and after handling Tink, and keeping her away from my face and my breathing. The last thing she needs is to get a cold, on top of everything else.)
Crazy yesterday
<== the enormous block of tofu slowed her down only a littleI am feeling really sick this weekend. Yesterday was bad -- I woke up at 8 in the morning (and I had only gone to bed at 3 am, so after only 5 hours of sleep) with weird weird dreams -- the kind that you feel you are clawing your way out of, trying to wake up, but you can't, you know? -- and found I was so stuffed up I couldn't go back to sleep. Also, I could hear Tink scrabbling in her cage and I was wondering what she was doing. So I got up and took some Nyquil, and then took a look at Tink.
Now this was really weird. Tink was like a maniac -- like a hamster on Speed, or on chocolate-covered expresso beans. I know she's more alert and active at night, but this was WEIRDLY alert and active. She has her usual pace, and this was like she was on fast-forward. Or 8 months younger. She was zipping around and around her cage, hopping on things, jumping on her wheel for 2 seconds, then jumping off, zipping through her little house, and if she ever stopped it was just for a second, for her to stand on her hind legs and sniff the air (she could smell me). And her good eye was really wide open, really round.
Now you have to understand...this is after a couple of weeks of her barely stumbling around her cage, what with the eye thing, on top of the diabetes -- and even before that -- she was never active like this. At first I was happy, and laughing, telling her how nice it was to see her so well. But then, as I watched, it started to dawn on me that perhaps this was not her "being well", but something else.
The only different thing I'd done was put vitamin drops in her water. Now, I know they have some glucose in them, but I thought since she was recovering with the bad eye, that perhaps it would do more good than harm. But after watching her spazzing-out, I thought I'd better take her water out and replace it. No more vitamin drops for Tink!
I took her out of her cage and let her zoom around the bathroom for a bit. She was really starting to worry me. I had noticed she hadn't eaten any of her tofu and veggies -- where was she getting the energy? And it couldn't be good to be over-exerting herself, could it? So I took her in the kitchen and got out a block of her favorite tofu. That slowed her down for a couple of minutes. She ate like 4 bites of it.
And the scrabbling? She has this little feeder container, that holds her seed mix, and it's supposed to just dribble down and replace what she's taken out. But she had taken it into her head to empty the thing. When I first came over to check on her, she was in there, dragging and kicking seeds out with all four legs, and she had basically emptyied the bin onto the floor of her cage. I wonder if she was looking for something specific, or if she just decided she wasn't going to wait for things to come to her, she wanted choices. She's a smart hamster. So no more seed-bin, either, for Tink! I'll go back to putting her mix in a bowl, since she seems to want better access to it.
Anyway, so that was Tink yesterday. When I got up again, at like 2 pm, she was fast asleep, and sleeping hard. No surprise there, she must have worn herself out, poor thing.
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Squeak!
I just thought of it...I know what Tink's squawking reminds me of. It sounds EXACTLY like a squeaky toy. Clara and Erik's dog, Turtle, has one, and every time he chews on it, it squeaks. I guess it's supposed to sound like some small animal, dying.
And now I know it does....disturbingly so....
And now I know it does....disturbingly so....
More worries...more questions...
<== the eye stationTink is still recovering. Still keeping that eye closed. Still not back to her happy, healthy self, yet.
I took a look at her eye tonight, and am wondering...it looks less whitish, somehow. More black, more normal-ish. I wonder if that means there's a chance for it? But it looks even smaller than last time. Maybe the surface of it is sloughing off? I guess I don't know much about eyes. Maybe if I have a chance, I'll look it up.
<== weird lump under her chinA couple of days ago, I had a terrible "oh no!" moment...I was looking Tink over, and I found this little lump right under her chin. I took a picture of it, and am going to ask my sister about it, because she had a mouse that developed a tumor, and I wonder if this could be something similar? But the next day, and then again today, it seemed much smaller, and I'm breathing a tentative sigh of relief. Maybe it was just the hamster equivalent of a zit. Which would make sense, considering she's been pretty greasy, and that lump is on the same side as her bad eye, where all the ointment's been applied. But THEN I had another worrisome thought -- what if it IS a tumor, and what if there's more than one? What if it was a tumor pushing her eye out like that? But then, why would it just go away? So maybe it's not a tumor. See, now I have tons more unanswered questions.
Anyway.
I've been gone the last night and today, and worried about leaving her, but she seemed just fine when I got back today. Maybe a little fatter, or is that wishful thinking?
Her fur on her face was back to normal, but the fur on her back still looks greasy. I've been dabbing some warm, soapy water on it with a q-tip, and then rinsing it off...maybe every two days or so. I keep hoping I can help accelerate the cleaning of her fur that way. But I don't know that I'm being much help. Her skin looks a bit red and irritated -- a lot like the pictures in that last post. I think she's been scratching it a lot. I'm assuming because she's trying to groom herself. I hope, anyway.
Worrying, worrying...
I know what Brett would say: "Leave that damn hamster alone!!"
Sigh. But if I could do that...if I weren't obsessive-compulsive, I probably wouldn't have been drawn to hamsters in the first place...
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
A little better
Tink is better, I think. She's keeping the bad eye closed, now that it's shrunk back to a normal size, but every morning I pry it open to take a look, and wipe the gunk around it off. I think her eye is literally dissolving -- turning into mush, I guess -- because it seems like every morning it's smaller and harder to identify as an "eye". I'm a little worried about her other eye, now, because yesterday it looked like she was sleeping with that eye open -- which is not normal. But today it seemed ok, and she does seem to be able to close it. I'm keeping close watch.
She's very grumpy, as is expected. The better she gets, the less sweet and more grumpy she gets. The last two days she's been really bitey -- and not love pecks or nips, either! But maybe that's a good sign -- that she has more strength I suppose? And, she's been getting really vocal. She makes this sound which sounds like a bird "squawk" every time i touch her bad eye. And what about her fur? It's been 3 days since she's had ointment on her, but her fur doesn't seem much improved. I don't want to bathe her, since she's been through so much already. But I would have thought the ointment would have been rubbed off of her by now.
And she's still hunching.
Poor thing. She's been through so much! It's so inspiring. She just keeps plugging on, no matter how bad life gets.Sunday, April 09, 2006
The Franken-Eye
Tink's normal eyes
I went up to visit Clara in San Francisco for about 10 days. I was supposed to relax, hang out, and get lots of job applications done. Unfortunately, there was a most tragic turn of events. I had brought Tink, in her aquarium, and a big tub of toys and food up with me. Six days into it, I noticed that Tink seemed to be having trouble closing her right eye. I showed it to Clara, and she thought we should at least put something on it, to keep it moist. She told me how when they operated on mice, they had to put vaseline on their eyes because the mice wouldn't close their eyes when they were under anesthesia. I hunted online for dwarf hamsters and eye trouble, and found this article on Sputnik and Kosmo, two dwarfs who had glaucoma. It also mentioned something about putting ointment on the eyes, so they wouldn't dry out. So Clara and I dabbed a little Neosporin on Tink's eye, and went to bed.
(Note: This was not a good idea, I later learned. Neosporin shouldn't be put into anyone's eye, human or animal. Vaseline isn't great, but it's still better than Neosporin. I read on a vet site about prolapsed eyes in dogs, that one could flush the eye with saline, and then use KY jelly. That makes more sense, as KY jelly is water-based. But, better yet, is ointment from the store especially formulated for eyes. We couldn't have gotten it that night, as all the stores were already closed, but we should've used Vaseline rather than Neosporin. Sigh. I am always learning.)
The Franken-Eye
The next day, Tink looked AWFUL. She had rubbed the Neosporin all over herself while grooming, which flattened her hair and made her look half her size. This in turn made her eye look all the bigger, and scarier. I called her vet in LA, and she said it was urgent for Tink to see a vet, that there might be some sort of infection behind her eye that was swelling and pushing the eye out. So I made an appointment for that evening with an unknown vet up in San Francisco.
The place was very nice, with clean, smart little appointment rooms equipped with metal tables. All the literature and pictures on the walls were about cats and dogs. Ah, the usual pet hospital scenario.
I started to get uneasy -- I had seen places like this before -- two other pet hospitals who claimed to work with exotics, but in actuality seemed to know very little about rodents, and charged you $70 for the privilege of being told that they had no idea what was wrong with your hamster.
The vet was kind enough, but again, there were some little things which made me more uneasy about his abilities with hamsters. First of all, he seemed reluctant to try to pick her up, and mentioned how the dwarf hamsters were very "bitey", which struck me as odd -- because they're not, really, as a species -- I've heard of some darling, sweet hamsters that never bit in their lives. And Tink doesn't, either, unless you wake her up, or she's having a bad diabetic-day.
Then, once he had picked her up, he was having some trouble holding her. He pressed her eye, and said it was "firm", but didn't explain what that meant. He put her back down and didn't touch her again. He mentioned how there might be some sort of infection behind the eye -- exactly what my regular vet had said -- but how there was no way to tell without operating. He offered to stay late and operate, which was nice, at least. He left and sent an assistant in with a print-out of all the costs. I'd seen that before, too. The sign of a large, successful, impersonal operation. It was going to cost a couple hundred dollars in the end, and with 50/50 odds that Tink would survive. Plus I wouldn't be able to stay with her. They'd do the operation after-hours and call me to let me know what happened. Then, if she survived, they'd keep her there overnight in an incubator.
Oh God! There just had to be another way. So I said no to the operation, and yes to drops and ointment. I thought I'd rather be with her if she was going to die, than let her die in some strange place under anesthesia.
She was very tired, too, it seemed -- too tired to bite (which she does quite readily, when provoked), and actually fell asleep in my hand a couple of times while Clara and I tried to clean ointment off of her. That's a first for her. We had taken to trying to clean her with cotton pads and some drops of gentle dog shampoo in warm water, and then using a hair-dryer and tiny, soft cosmetic brushes to fluff her fur. It was a losing battle, though, because even if we did manage to get her cleaner, we had to put more ointment on her, and THAT would eventually end up all over her head, again. She was so tired and miserable, that she just lay in my hands through all this, occasionally dozing off. If she got restless, I'd let her run around on the table, and she looked really frightful -- all hunched and scraggly, with one big staring eye, the other, normal, eye scrunched closed. Clara pointed out her "hunch" -- she said that her mice would do that when they were really miserable or about to die.
Those two days -- Wednesday and Thursday -- were the worst. By Thursday night I was worried that I had made the wrong choice, that Tink was in continual pain, that she had a raging infection in her eye. That night, when I held her, her tiny body was shivering all over. And her beautiful fur, which she had always kept so neat and clean, was matted flat against her head in some places, stuck up in stiff spikes in others. Her little poops were all wrong, too -- the wrong color, and too soft. Probably because she was ingesting about 50 percent of the medicine we managed to get on her, through her process of grooming. Most heart-breaking of all was, though, was how sweetly she was bearing her misfortune. She was more patient than I had ever seen her. By that night, she seemed to have learned to brace herself and keep still when I applied her drops and smoothed on a glob of ointment. In fact, as I held her and gently brushed at her matted hair, she licked my hand and fingers. I think she was grooming me, too. That's when I decided it didn't matter how much it would cost -- I would put it on a credit card -- but I would take her to her regular vet for that surgery.
Friday, I drove back to LA. Tink's eye was looking better, but I made an appointment with her vet anyway, for Saturday morning, and checked on the price of surgery. It was less than half of what that other place was going to charge. Of course. I kept stopping to check on her -- at one point I pulled off of the freeway in a panic -- because she wasn't moving, or responding to my voice. I think she was just deeply asleep. She woke up when I picked her up, thank God, and I doubled my driving speed after that, trying to get her home faster.
Saturday was the end of the nightmare. That morning, Tink's eye had shrank back to almost normal size, AND we were going to see her vet. What a relief to get to Dr. Oliver's office! Small, cramped, filled to the brim with pictures and stuffed animals of all kinds. And Dr. Oliver is the best. She wrapped Tink in a towel and started washing off her eye -- and Tink just sat there! No squirming. I said how shocking that was, and she joked that she had a unique gift for torturing animals. But of course, the opposite is true. She has the confidence and assurance of lots of experience, and once you see that, you realize how little those other vets know.
So Tink didn't need surgery, Dr. Oliver thought. She hoped that the eye would simply get reabsorbed into Tink's body, and diasappear. The eye itself was whitish -- Dr. Oliver said it's completely gone. She is almost certainly blind in that eye, and it isn't producing tears, so I have to keep it lubricated with drops -- but no more ointment, yay! And as a result, Tink's fur is starting to look a little more normal. And today, Tink was closing her eye on her own! That means that there's no nerve damage, I think.
The week of the Franken-Eye is over.
I went up to visit Clara in San Francisco for about 10 days. I was supposed to relax, hang out, and get lots of job applications done. Unfortunately, there was a most tragic turn of events. I had brought Tink, in her aquarium, and a big tub of toys and food up with me. Six days into it, I noticed that Tink seemed to be having trouble closing her right eye. I showed it to Clara, and she thought we should at least put something on it, to keep it moist. She told me how when they operated on mice, they had to put vaseline on their eyes because the mice wouldn't close their eyes when they were under anesthesia. I hunted online for dwarf hamsters and eye trouble, and found this article on Sputnik and Kosmo, two dwarfs who had glaucoma. It also mentioned something about putting ointment on the eyes, so they wouldn't dry out. So Clara and I dabbed a little Neosporin on Tink's eye, and went to bed. (Note: This was not a good idea, I later learned. Neosporin shouldn't be put into anyone's eye, human or animal. Vaseline isn't great, but it's still better than Neosporin. I read on a vet site about prolapsed eyes in dogs, that one could flush the eye with saline, and then use KY jelly. That makes more sense, as KY jelly is water-based. But, better yet, is ointment from the store especially formulated for eyes. We couldn't have gotten it that night, as all the stores were already closed, but we should've used Vaseline rather than Neosporin. Sigh. I am always learning.)
The Franken-Eye
The next day, Tink looked AWFUL. She had rubbed the Neosporin all over herself while grooming, which flattened her hair and made her look half her size. This in turn made her eye look all the bigger, and scarier. I called her vet in LA, and she said it was urgent for Tink to see a vet, that there might be some sort of infection behind her eye that was swelling and pushing the eye out. So I made an appointment for that evening with an unknown vet up in San Francisco. The place was very nice, with clean, smart little appointment rooms equipped with metal tables. All the literature and pictures on the walls were about cats and dogs. Ah, the usual pet hospital scenario.
I started to get uneasy -- I had seen places like this before -- two other pet hospitals who claimed to work with exotics, but in actuality seemed to know very little about rodents, and charged you $70 for the privilege of being told that they had no idea what was wrong with your hamster.
The vet was kind enough, but again, there were some little things which made me more uneasy about his abilities with hamsters. First of all, he seemed reluctant to try to pick her up, and mentioned how the dwarf hamsters were very "bitey", which struck me as odd -- because they're not, really, as a species -- I've heard of some darling, sweet hamsters that never bit in their lives. And Tink doesn't, either, unless you wake her up, or she's having a bad diabetic-day.
Then, once he had picked her up, he was having some trouble holding her. He pressed her eye, and said it was "firm", but didn't explain what that meant. He put her back down and didn't touch her again. He mentioned how there might be some sort of infection behind the eye -- exactly what my regular vet had said -- but how there was no way to tell without operating. He offered to stay late and operate, which was nice, at least. He left and sent an assistant in with a print-out of all the costs. I'd seen that before, too. The sign of a large, successful, impersonal operation. It was going to cost a couple hundred dollars in the end, and with 50/50 odds that Tink would survive. Plus I wouldn't be able to stay with her. They'd do the operation after-hours and call me to let me know what happened. Then, if she survived, they'd keep her there overnight in an incubator.
Oh God! There just had to be another way. So I said no to the operation, and yes to drops and ointment. I thought I'd rather be with her if she was going to die, than let her die in some strange place under anesthesia.
I asked if they had some way to clean her fur off, and he said that since she was more comfortable with me holding her, I should just do it at home with q-tips and some diluted dish-soap. Hmm. Not a very satisfying answer...
The next day her eye hadn't improved. In fact, what appeared to be pus had started oozing from the corners of her eyes. I put ointment and drops on her eye about every 4 hours. The eye was becoming increasingly sensitive -- she was chattering continually, now, when I picked her up, and would let out a big "squawk!" when I tried to clean it with a q-tip, and would jerk when the drops hit her eye, which made them run down into her nose, and then she would sneeze and start frantically grooming at her whiskers.She was very tired, too, it seemed -- too tired to bite (which she does quite readily, when provoked), and actually fell asleep in my hand a couple of times while Clara and I tried to clean ointment off of her. That's a first for her. We had taken to trying to clean her with cotton pads and some drops of gentle dog shampoo in warm water, and then using a hair-dryer and tiny, soft cosmetic brushes to fluff her fur. It was a losing battle, though, because even if we did manage to get her cleaner, we had to put more ointment on her, and THAT would eventually end up all over her head, again. She was so tired and miserable, that she just lay in my hands through all this, occasionally dozing off. If she got restless, I'd let her run around on the table, and she looked really frightful -- all hunched and scraggly, with one big staring eye, the other, normal, eye scrunched closed. Clara pointed out her "hunch" -- she said that her mice would do that when they were really miserable or about to die.
Those two days -- Wednesday and Thursday -- were the worst. By Thursday night I was worried that I had made the wrong choice, that Tink was in continual pain, that she had a raging infection in her eye. That night, when I held her, her tiny body was shivering all over. And her beautiful fur, which she had always kept so neat and clean, was matted flat against her head in some places, stuck up in stiff spikes in others. Her little poops were all wrong, too -- the wrong color, and too soft. Probably because she was ingesting about 50 percent of the medicine we managed to get on her, through her process of grooming. Most heart-breaking of all was, though, was how sweetly she was bearing her misfortune. She was more patient than I had ever seen her. By that night, she seemed to have learned to brace herself and keep still when I applied her drops and smoothed on a glob of ointment. In fact, as I held her and gently brushed at her matted hair, she licked my hand and fingers. I think she was grooming me, too. That's when I decided it didn't matter how much it would cost -- I would put it on a credit card -- but I would take her to her regular vet for that surgery.
Friday, I drove back to LA. Tink's eye was looking better, but I made an appointment with her vet anyway, for Saturday morning, and checked on the price of surgery. It was less than half of what that other place was going to charge. Of course. I kept stopping to check on her -- at one point I pulled off of the freeway in a panic -- because she wasn't moving, or responding to my voice. I think she was just deeply asleep. She woke up when I picked her up, thank God, and I doubled my driving speed after that, trying to get her home faster.
Saturday was the end of the nightmare. That morning, Tink's eye had shrank back to almost normal size, AND we were going to see her vet. What a relief to get to Dr. Oliver's office! Small, cramped, filled to the brim with pictures and stuffed animals of all kinds. And Dr. Oliver is the best. She wrapped Tink in a towel and started washing off her eye -- and Tink just sat there! No squirming. I said how shocking that was, and she joked that she had a unique gift for torturing animals. But of course, the opposite is true. She has the confidence and assurance of lots of experience, and once you see that, you realize how little those other vets know.
So Tink didn't need surgery, Dr. Oliver thought. She hoped that the eye would simply get reabsorbed into Tink's body, and diasappear. The eye itself was whitish -- Dr. Oliver said it's completely gone. She is almost certainly blind in that eye, and it isn't producing tears, so I have to keep it lubricated with drops -- but no more ointment, yay! And as a result, Tink's fur is starting to look a little more normal. And today, Tink was closing her eye on her own! That means that there's no nerve damage, I think.
The week of the Franken-Eye is over.
