Goodnight Sweetheart
Asleep on the radiator
Originally uploaded by inkognitoh. It has been a bit of a long week for me in that I've been nursing a very sick little hamster. A year and a half ago when I found myself the owner of a baby hamster, I often joked that if he ever got sick or died, it would be cheaper to buy another one than to pay for treatment. If he only held on one more night, we'd have been at the veterinary surgery right now, hopefully getting medication and getting well.
When I picked him up on Wednesday night he weighed the same as a dandelion and was positively skeletal. It turns out that he hadn't been eating for a couple of days and was squirreling his food away under his bedding, probably saving it for when he felt better. He had been drinking though, I'd been monitoring that. I knew the dangers of dehydration.
Of course I'd read loads of information about diaohrea being really harmful to hamsters and that if not treated immediately, possibly fatal but it never occured to me that Jose was going to die from it. I thought that I could make him well again. The sad reality is, I probably killed him with my aggressive and persistant campaign of force-feeding, trying to keep him alive until I could get him to the Vet on Saturday morning.
I'm so sorry little Monkey Boy. You will be missed.