Rats and Mice and Guinea Pigs, Oh my!

It’s very easy to earn yourself a reputation in a vet clinic. It’s particularly easy to earn yourself a reputation as being “The vet who will do all the other things the other vets do not want to do.” This is why it took me less than ten days to get a reputation as “The rat girl.”

Your fellow vets are supposed to support the new graduate, especially in the first week of work. They’re not supposed to all say “Bags not it!” in quick succession and hide out the back when they see a guinea pig coming in, and definitely shouldn’t rush to say “Dr Ferox will see it!” when the nurse comes looking for a vet to see the patient in question.

So imagine me, frantically scurrying through two textbooks trying to find out anything about a possible list of conditions that I was never taught about, with the other vets not wanting anything to do with it. Why didn’t anybody ver teach me about opthalmic conditions of Cavia porcellus?At times like that, I miss not having easy access to Google in the vet clinic. I’m not ashamed to admit, sometimes you just need to plug a question into google and see what comes up. For example, I now know that guineapigs can secreate a milky white liquid over their eyes as part of grooming. This would be a very good reason why I was presented with a completely normal guinea pig early one afternoon that had worried his owner with a “totaly white eye”, that dissapeared by the time he got to the clinic. I couldn’t find anything wrong with all the tests I tried to do, but had a long chat with the owner about guinea pig care. In the end I told her to take a photo and send that in if it happens again.

It was rather unsatisfying from my point of view, but the owner seemed to have calmed down. Imagine my fear a week later when I see this little patient booked in for a check up. My heart sank, I was sure there was nothing wrong with that eye! I was thanking my lucky stars when it turned out to be a completely unrelated incident.

It wasn’t two ays later when a mouse gets booked in. For losing hair. Again a chorus of “Bags not it” and a reserved sigh on my part, knowing I’m unlikley to get help on this case either. Again, frantically scurrying through the textbooks trying to fin a short list of clues to get started. I walk into the consult and see a very thredbare mouse.  It had more bald patches than fur.

“Well sir, I’m going to have to do a skin scraping on your mouse. Mind if I take him out the back? It’s just that it’s very fiddly and delicate to do and I don’t want him to associate you with a bad experience.”

It was a good line, I genuinely didn’t think this guy could hold the mouse while I did the skin scrape and didn’t want to do it in front of him anyway, so I took the mouse out the back. The other vets conspicously wandered away as I grabbed a nurse to help me do the scrape. This was no easy task. A proper skin scrape involved taking a sharp scalple blade and scraping it repeatedly across the affected area of skin, picking up scale, mites and whatever else in there. Only in this case the scalple blade was almost bigger than a mouse. The area scraped was about 30% of the critter’s surface area.

Relief flooded my mind when I saw a collection of mites crawling around the microscope slide. The little buggers were swimming around comically in the oil, and now I had my diagnosis. Now for treatment. The books said Ivermectin.

We had ivermectin.

For sheep.

Five minutes with a calculator later I figured that I needed to dilute our concentrate about 800 times to get one mouse dose at 1/8th of a ml. I spend more time doing that, realising that this is going to cost the guy with the mouse $50- of that $49.50 is the consult fee and 50 cents is the treatment. He must really love his mouse, and it’s going to get better.

The third one was that Friday. The conversation went like this.

The boss walks in an plonks a small cage onto the table.

“Someone have a look at that rat for me.” Another vet calls out from a computer, without looking up.

“Dr Ferox will do it, she likes those sorts of creatures.” Oh do I now? I think to myself. Because I’m too slow to say ‘Bags not?’ I pick the rat out from its cage and place it on the table. It falls over. always to the same side, circling slowly. It bumps into things, tries to climb.

“It has a vestibular syndrome and it may be blind,” I decide, and place it back in the safety of its cage before getting a focal light to check its eyes.

“So what will that mean?”

“Uh, according to the one sentence in my book, either an ear infection or brain tumor. Probably a tumour if it’s blind.”

“Meh, just give it $20 worth of drugs and see what happens.” Ok, fine, antibiotics in case it’s an ear infection and steroids in case it’s a brain tumour.

The little rat actually looked better in the morning. I didn’t think that was going to last, but sometimes when you know bad news is coming a few days of near normality can still be a blessing.

I don’t mind treating mice, rats, guinea pigs and all the other little critters that the other vets seem to avoid, but I am going to have to get a better text book if this keeps up.

Just no chickens please.