One Down

I am:

-down one rat baby. I expect two or three more to die.
-sad. See above. Also the waiting impotently game sucks.
-sick. Fever & sore throat.
-busy today. Need to go to North Van to meet with my boss, go to the Drive for another meeting re: my upcoming cutting, and had planned to go grocery shopping with mom.
-happy I got to see Paul yesterday, but sad that he's gone again.
-feeling down despite extended cuddle time with Jacob and Esau last night.
(Oh my god. I just looked over at the rats and one of Oak's babies was playing dead. That did not help matters)
-really wishing I had access to all the snuggly boy rats I have at Lizzy's right now. Opal or Hades would clear all this angst right up for at least a bit.
-really wishing Angus was not sick too, but of course he got it first so I'm a day behind him. Seems to be the way things work.

Good stuff:

-at least one foster baby had milk in its tummy, visibly, when I checked this morning. I wish I knew if it was the one I fed or not so I would know whether to try feeding the others or not.
-Angus rearranged the livingroom and it's nice.
-Granville Island is actually a ten minute walk from my house, who knew? And there is galangal and lemongrass and kaffir lime there.
-May have found the beads I want to make cup-marker-jewelery with for Angus' folks.
-Cinderella has paused in trying to kill me through the cage.
-I have a box of actual kleenex in the house.
-The burmese rat girls are trying to distract me by hanging upside-down from the roof of their cage and making funny faces at me.
-Angus loves me.

Triumph

I came home and there were thirteen babies in Popcorn's cage still alive. There was milk in all but one of them to a greater or lesser extent. Excuse me, I am incoherent.

That means that there are three of Charlie's babies out of the original 8 that I don't expect to immediately die, and to be honest only two I would not be surprised if they lived.

But... then there's this one little one with no milk in it. It looks like a concentration camp victim, where you can't believe it's alive, but it's fighting and squirming! It's not squeaking, it knows there's no point. just squirming. It's alive. The little thing is a third the size of Popcorn's own babies who were born a day later (and a day is a lot in baby rat days, at six weeks they can have babies of their own. Remember that). You can see every rib and hipbone. Its ears haven't begun separating from its head yet, it's definitely developmentally behind.

It probably hasn't had a full belly ever. Even the abdomen is sunken. I can't even tell what sex it is because the distance between urethral opening and anus is nonexistent cause the abdomen is basically nonexistent.

So I thought I had given up on the formula, but then I realised I hadn't. I make up some more, heated it, cut another little piece of rag the size of my thumb with a thread hanging off, and figured I'd give this a try. I dipped the rag, squeezed it almost dry, and put the tiny end of the thread against the baby's mouth. It started licking! I squeezed the cloth and redipped and squeezed and redipped. We're talking about fractions of a drop at a time here. Slowly some magic began to happen. Babies are pretty transparent at this stage, and you can usually see milk in their bellies when their full. This one didn't get full right away, but a little stretch of intestine under the skin turned white with the milk I'd given it. This bit of intestine is the thickness of a pin.

I stopped for a bit, rubbed the baby's tummy and anus super lightly with a corner of the rag-- the mom rats lick babies like that so they can clean up and the babies don't make a mess in the nest. They can't pee or poop without that stimulation. And... after awhile we could see a little milk in the actual tummy. A pinch test on the skin indicated less dehydration. The baby went back in with Popcorn while I went to the gym.

I was not expecting the baby to be alive when I came home. I was not expecting it to be alive when I came back from the gym, but there it was, and more lively too. When I picked it up it opened its mouth immediately.

I heated up some more formula.

After a little while (maybe twenty minutes of trying not to get formula up the nose, trying not to choke the baby, and coaxing it to open its mouth several billion times) there was an actual milk belly.

I definitely got a little formula up the nose. It cleared out a moment later, I hope. A runty baby like this may not even make it through the night, if it makes it to adulthood likely won't live long in any case, and will most certainly have respiratory issues if I have to keep feeding it every couple of hours, if it lives, because there will be some lung damage from this.

The baby is alive, though. And... this picture of a little white streak in a shocking ugly dead-looking pink thing is probably the most triumphant document I have besides my permaculture certificate.

Cut for looking really creepy:( Read more... )