(no subject)
(er, shirt is a reference to this, I'm not just being vulgar.)
So... Guildenstern, one of our two pet ratties, has had a lump for quite a while. I took Rosencrantz and Guilda down to the vet in the Village (one of the few that actually deals with exotic pets, like, y'know, those rats that are all over the freakin place in New York) a couple weeks ago, and the vet said that while it felt like a tumor, she got a bit of pus out of it, so it was probably an abscess.
Well, after 2 weeks of antibiotics, it was still there, so it really should be drained.
It wasn't an abscess. It was a mammary-gland tumor.
These are actually pretty common in rats, but not when they're so young (these guys are 4 mos old). This is probably bad. We're going to have some tests run on the extracted tissue to see what the deal is. Right now Guil's lying in the travel cage, still sedated and not moving. She'll need food and water soon, she hasn't had any all day, but I tried to give her some sugar water off my finger a little bit ago and she wasn't interested. I think she's still only semi-conscious.
Poor little rattie.
However, I'm really, really ticked off at the vet, even though she renders good care, because she told me to bring the rat by around 8:30. I thought this meant that, y'know, she does surgeries before her usual day of visits. No, she actually just meant that I should drop the rat off and then go about my business... so I sat in the vet's office for an hour and a half waiting for her to show up while the vet assistant's semi-annoying, semi-cute 5-year-old daughter kept asking if she could hold the "hamster." She saw Guil crawl in my shirt, like she loves to do, so of course she had to have her do the same for her shirt. Etc. It would've been cuter if she hadn't demanded to hold her every time she was not holding her.
Anyway, so, I asked when the surgery would be -- "Oh, we don't know, we just do them during the day," etc., and they would call me. I asked that they call me about 45 minutes before she's ready to go home -- no, they can't do that, because that's not what they do, and anyway the rat would need her recovery time first, from the sedative. So I went to my office, which is walking distance from the clinic, and where I needed to clean out some old papers. Time passed. I went to meet up with Moonlightalice for lunch, and called the vet to see how the rattie was doing; they told me she was fine. Great! So just to be sure, I killed some time at a nearby Barnes & Noble in a high-security mall, got back to the vet clinic at like 3:30, where I was told that it would be just another hour and a half. (WTF?) So I wait with my book (which is really good, by the way) and read for like two hours, before deciding to go to Coldstone around 5:30. MA calls -- she's now done with work! And comes to meet me at Coldstone. We walk back to the vet. It is now 6:20. When we get there, the vet is just now suturing up the tumor removal site.
We then wait another hour and a half while they take care of administrative business for the owner of a couple of cats that got spayed that afternoon, too. Never mind that we had a 7 PM appointment to look at an apartment, that I rescheduled for 8 and then finally cancelled because there was no way; never mind that they never once during the whole day, despite repeatedly asking them when the rat would be ready, gave me a rough time, and that all the estimates that they gave me were wrong; never mind that this was an operation I'd been led to believe would get me home around 10 AM, so I could shower and all that. No, no... we weren't out until 7:45. So what'd I do today? I spent today at the vet. Bah.
Anyway.
While at the bookstore, I encountered this little piece of joy. I won't even start to address the content, but wow. Draw your own Ann Coulter comparisons.