Life Of Vincent

Last Wednesday, we took one of our pet rats to the vet to have a tumor removed. Rats are much beloved by the medical research community because they get all sorts of strange and unexplainable tumors. Little Abbie got a big one.

Our vet charged us $120 for the tumor removal (which was about the same size she was), antibiotics and pain meds, and a stay at the vet's house overnight. The vet is a GREAT person.

Abbie was doing fine, and we decided to try introducing her back into the same cage as her sister Lilly. They got along well, Lilly didn't try to take Abbie's stitches out, and everything seemed great.

Then, we got complacent. We left the two of them together too long, and at about 3pm on Saturday, Lilly chewed all of Abbie's external stitches open. It was still stitched up internally, but open on the outside.

We immediately separated them, and tried to stop Abbie's leaking. She wasn't bleeding so much as leaking bloody fluid. But she still had a hole the length of her leg in her side, and that's not a good thing. We couldn't get the leaking to stop, so at 11pm, we took her to an all-night vet clinic.

$252 and 5 hours later, we brought her home. She wasn't leaking, but she was drugged to the point where every few minutes we had to run her face to make her blink, and she'd drop her head into her rat litter (pelletized paper shreds that make up the "carpet" in all our rate cages) and get her nose stuffed up and have trouble breathing, which she was too drugged to correct.

At about 8am yesterday I lay down to get some sleep. About 9:30am, my mom woke me up to tell me Abbie was trying to pull her stitches out. From about 9:30am to 3pm, I did nothing except sit on the couch with this rat and try to annoy her enough that she wasn't concentrating on her stitches. From about 9:30am to 3pm, my mom freaked out.

My dad got home sometime around 3pm, and Abbie immediately took a liking to him. (She's never shown any affection to anyone except me and mom). He lined a laundry basket with a towel, put her in there, and watched TV all afternoon. She spent all that time curled up next to his hand, apparently thinking it was her sister. He got her to eat and drink when no one else could...dad saved her life yesterday.

He sat with her until two in the morning, when he got me and had me take over. I slept from maybe 10pm until 2am this morning. I took Abbie downstairs and watched an entire disc of The Black Donnellys. At 5:15am, I got my mom up to take over for me, since that's near to the time she gets up anyway. From 5:45am to about 8:30am, I slept.

This evening I will have gone nearly 76 hours on nearly 8 hours of sleep. One more day like this, and I will have matched my personal insomniatic best. Oh yeah and, in that time, I also wrote two papers and annoyed at least 2 European liberals who want to invade Iran.

I cannot wait for tonight. When school gets out at 6:30pm, I'm going home, opening a Coke, and watching Prison Break, Kville, and CSI:Miami straight through.

By the way, have you ever tried to flirt when you're running on 4 hours of sleep in 48? It sucks, and I'm bad at it to start with