Yeah it is really stressful. Just administering all the medicine and then monitoring the rat closely, and I sort of end up with a background anxiety of rat health worry too, that I then sometimes becomes conscious when I notice that my stomach is feeling all clenched up.

These times always make me wonder whether I shouldn't switch to a cat as a pet after all, because there you might have a decade before it starts getting all the old age ailments rather than a year with a rat before the problems tend to start. Though of course you just might get a cat with some chronic illness that manifest early and then give it meds every day for fifteen years. It's not like you'd kick it to the curb because you end up with the bad luck of a diabetic cat or one needing heart medicine or whatever. And in the end you just can't be safe from illness and age with pets (except the heartless jerks who do kick their sick animals out). And I don't have a garden and not much space and I find the idea of cat food slightly gross too, whereas with rats I can just share my vegetarian food preferences for the most part (admittedly most commercial rat food has some animal protein in it, but its extruded pellets so you can't even tell).