Pearl has surgery

Sorry there havn’t been any posts this week. I hope I didn’t lose too many of my readers. I have been extremely swamped with homework and tests, along with Amme’s dogs being down here while her parents are down-state. Also our little rat, Pearl, went into surgery to get an ulcerated malignant mamalry tumor removed. You can see what it looked like, outlined in blue in the photo below:

Pearl's tumor

We were really worried about how it would turn out since she’s old for a rat (2.3 years) and had gotten quite thin. It had to come off so we decided to take a chance and she did very well. They removed most of her mamalry on the right side and dermabonded her up (medical super glue). They put her in a little body cast while she rested up and it was painted like a little football jersey. I don’t have a picture of it but our vet does on her phone. I’ll try to get it and update this post later.

The next night she chewed off some of the dermabond and it had opened up. Rats are obsessed about being clean and will take band-aids and nailpolish very carefully off your fingers because they think you are dirty, so naturally, she saw the dermabond as the same. Luckily it was only a little bit and we brought her to the emergency vet where they put in a few staples so it would hold better. They didn’t charge us anything because our vet is a sister orginization to the emergency vet. This is the full length of the incision they did:

pearl's incision

and heres one of her just being cute:

post-op cuteness

She’s still a little sluggish, mostly from soreness I think, but we’re hopeing she’ll make a full recovery.

PS: What do you guys and gals think of my new forest-green theme? The theme-switching buttons in the upper-right of this page should be working.

Tags: