Real Rats: Jewel's Story

Jewel was another of the YRB rescue rats. (For more about who the YRB rats were, please see my earlier Real Rats articles.) She was a shy, thin, nervous PEW girl with bulgy pink eyes that shone a pretty shade of pink when they reflected light.

I never really got to know Jewel very well, since she kept mostly to herself. She was one of the few YRB girls who didn't ever really learn to play. When she was out, she spent most of her time running from one safe spot to another. She loved being behind the boxes under my dresser, squeezing behind my bookcase or hiding among the boxes at the bottom of the closet. She would come up to me to collect her share of treats, sneaking toward me from under the bed then scampering to safety once she had a yummy piece of cereal or yogurt drop in her mouth. I always felt sorry for her, since she had such a sad look in her eyes. What she went through at that store, I'll never know, but she seemed to have decided all humans were too scary to even try to make friends with them.

After we had had the girls about 8 months, four of them developed mammary tumors within days of each other. It was a scary time for me, since I kept finding lumps, lumps everywhere. Jewel was one of the first ones I noticed tumors on. Fortunately, none of the girls had malignant tumors and none of them died of cancer-related causes, although I'm sure the tumors did stress their systems quite a bit. About a month after I noticed the tumors, Jewel suffered a stroke during which she lost most of the control of one side of her body and her head tilted to one side at a strange angle. Worried that she would get hurt falling off a shelf, I moved her from the big cage into our infirmary cage, where she was later joined by Shorty, who was having trouble getting around due to her age.

Shorty and Jewel lived together for about a month. During this time, Jewel began to get better. She lost much of her head tilt and could use her paws almost as well as she could before her stroke. Then, one weekend we went to visit relatives and returned to find sweet, old Shorty had died. Jewel was lying on top of her, trying to keep her warm, and crying pitifully. After I removed Shorty's body, I noticed Jewel was having trouble walking again. She had apparently suffered another stroke from the stress of losing her friend. And if that weren't bad enough, sometime later that night, she injured her eye on a piece of aspen bedding. When I looked in on her the next morning, it had swollen shut, and she was crying again.

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