(no subject)

Mar 11, 2011 22:11

I don't know how much, if any, I wrote here about what I've been going through since may or so last year.

So, here's a quick summary.

Wild rat breaks in and attacks my darling pet rats.

Wounds abscess. Evacuate rats from vulnerable room, while keeping them in their own groups.

Attempt to treat abscesses with doxy, clav, trisul and even human antibiotics. Spend several hours a day for many months feeding rats drugs in chocolate goop from a spoon. Nothing works.

Have small mental breakdown. Eventually give up on antibiotics for fear of creating antibiotic resistant strain of hell abscess bacteria. Lie about it.

Eventually remove infected rats back downstairs after wild rat dies. Proper airspace quarantine in effect now as well as the contact quarantine we've had going this whole time (eg, not putting infected rats in cages with clean rats, no playtimes together, no cage swappys without proper cleaning, etc.)

Discuss with frank a few times.

Discuss with frank and mention the abscess goop looks like cottage cheese. Nearly wrote tastes there. Whoops. Suddenly we have his interest. He does research. Points us in the direction of mycobacterium microti. Yes. For those who bother to look it up, that's FUCKING VOLE TUBERCULOSIS. FUCK YOU, LONG DEAD WILD RAT. FUCK YOU RIGHT IN THE EYE.

So, for several weeks I barely sleep. Have nightmares. Etc etc.

Monday morning, went over to franks with one frozen, infected corpse, and one fresh, uninfected corpse since Avo was kind enough to pass away that day. We do necropsys. For the record, that was actually really really interesting, which is just as well cause I'm going to have to do them routinely from now on.

Necropsy confirmed two things. My quarantine worked, and the infected have symptoms identical to vole TB.

Many days of crying and debating and discussing followed.

But in the end, I decided, while it's nice to put a name on it, it has only confirmed what we already knew - that we're dealing with a highly contagious rodent disease spread by contact, sometimes lethal, sometimes going into remission but always eventually returning. We don't know exactly how it's spread, possibly by bite, or saliva, or urine, or crap, or something else that a rat in the cage next door isn't exposed to but the rats in the cage with the infected are. Hell, maybe it's spread by eating abscess gunk.

We'll never know now anyhow. Yesterday all the infected were put to sleep.

I have 30 less rats than I did.

I feel broken.

I cry a lot.

I don't know how I'll tell anyone. I told dad, and that just inspired him to give me a preachy spiel about how this is natures way of telling me I shouldn't have so many pets. I'm quite surprised I didn't immediately cry at him or hit him with something big and sharp.

I think I'll be avoiding him awhile now.

I dunno, I want to avoid everyone, but at the same time I want to get the hell outta the house and be distracted and social and have fun, but yeaaaaah, that's not happening.

I hurt.
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