Boo, February

This week is officially fired.

Too much tumult and turmoil in the Scurvy household of late. Wife was largely feeling better after her mini-visit to the hospital last Saturday and Sunday, but has still been really sick in the mornings. (No, it is most definitely not that, so don't even go there.) She's out of sick days at work, though, and just started a new job, so we tussled back and forth on Wednesday morning, as she didn't feel like going in, I kept trying to convince her to suck it up and deal, etc.

She ended up staying home that day, but drove in to work this morning. After, you know, making repeated stops to throw up on the side of the road. Once she got to work, her bosses pretty much immediately told her to go home and stay home for the week. Err, yeah, there's a reason why I'm not a doctor and don't even play one on tv.

Normally I'd have driven her when we carpooled in, but I was busy taking ScurvyRat back to the vet. He'd developed an abcess just to the side of his peas and carrots a little over a week ago, which is basically the rat equivalent of a boil, and a fairly common malady that they get. The vet drained it, gave him some antibiotics, and he seemed to be completely fine, eating like a horse rat, scampering around.

But last night another big abcess developed near the first one, which turned out to be two abcesses when I took him to the vet today. She cleaned the new ones out, but was guarded about the prognosis, since the infection had obviously spread. If she caught it all and the new antiobiotics she gave us knock it out, he'll be fine. If it spreads any more and new abcesses form, surgery is really the only option, to completely remove all infected tissue, and that's a whole other ball of wax, as far as if its right to put him through that, and even being able to operate, given the location of the infections.

He's nearly 2.5 years old, so he's had a good, long rat life. The sucky part is that other than this crap, which likely resulted from something simple like a cut or scrape getting infected, he's really healthy and active for his age. He bounced back from the assorted trauma today pretty well, hasn't gnawed out the stitch they put in, and ate a bunch and crashed out.

At this point, there's no reason not to believe that the antiobiotics will clear it all up and he'll be fine, so that's what we're going to stick with. But preparing myself for the potential idea of a rat-free household is pretty sad. So if you have any extra pet-get-well mojo lying around, feel free to send some ScurvyRat's way.