rat health update

[ratcreature]

The antibiotics didn't help with the strange breathing sounds and hiccups my rat Dustin makes, so I took him to the vet again this afternoon. This time the vet took an x-ray of Dustin's heart and lungs (under anesthesia, thankfully it was with gas so it wore off quickly), and besides the heart not being in quite the right position, there's also something wrong with his lung. There's an area that doesn't look like it should, presumably either water in his lung, or it could be an abscess. He also said it could be a collapsed area if Dustin had injured himself, but his ribs were all okay, and I never noticed any accidents or Dustin acting as if in pain (I mean I would have brought him to the vet then!), so that's less likely. That side apparently also sounds different when he listened to Dustin's breathing, but Dustin didn't like to hold still, so the vet had a hard time hearing anything definite over his movements and struggling.

Anyway, the vet gave him an injection of some med to help drain the water from the lung, which if it works should cause the sounds to improve tonight, and I am to watch him closely, to be able to tell whether this course of treatment works. I also got some to give him twice tomorrow (luckily I can give it to him orally) and then I have to bring Dustin to see the vet again Friday morning. I hope I at least recognize this, because he doesn't make these sounds constantly, only sometimes, and also the sounds are rather quiet, i.e. I either have to be very close or there has to be no background noise of any kind for me to hear it at all, so it's a hard to judge whether it's really getting better.

This sucks. Dustin's only eight months, it's unfair that he has to deal such problems, and this is far more serious than I expected. I'm really worried about him.

On the rather shallow side it also seems like I won't be buying the Firefly DVDs I wanted to get, because obviously the vet costs that are piling up have priority.

Comments

[cereta.livejournal.com]

Oh, hon. I'm so sorry you're going through this.

[ratcreature]

It just sucks so much. I mean, Dustin's such a delightful little rat, like, he's friendly with everybody, and sometimes likes to curl up on me when I'm using the computer, and he has awesome kickboxing skills when he scuffles with his brother...I just want Dustin to go old and gray, which, granted, for rats is only about two and a half years, even when you're lucky with their health, but still, he ought to get that much. At least so far he doesn't seem to be affected too much by whatever heart and lung problems he has, I mean, he's lively, plays and eats, so I hope still this condition won't deteriorate quickly and will turn out be at least manageable or something like that.

[catmoran.livejournal.com]

Oh, the poor little guy! I hope the latest meds do the trick.

(Don't let the name & icon fool you. I may be a cat, but I adore ratties and *not* as food.)

[ratcreature]

Thanks, I hope the meds will work too. He seems to have really bad luck to have something serious like this when he's still rather young, but I guess he might have been born with the heart anomaly, and that caused the lung problems or something. I mean, my sister's last cat had something like that, only the heart problems weren't properly diagnosed, only the asthma resulting from them, so her vet actually thought the cat just had allergies for a long time.

At least my current vet has experience with rats and really tries for them as well, whereas with one of my previous rats I was at a vet once who was all about how it's wasn't really worth to go through all the trouble (IIRC, that rat was a bit older and had cancer) because it's not like the rat had cost all that much to begin with... (well he didn't put it quite that bluntly but that was the gist)

[brownbetty]

I'm sorry to hear that. That generally sucks all round. Best wishes for Dustin.

[ratcreature]

Thanks.