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.
