neonleonb

Chester, my one remaining guinea pig, had a tooth extraction on Thursday. His tooth had started growing in crookedly, so it, and the matching lower tooth, had to be pulled. On Friday morning, he was recovering well, but on Friday night he seemed a little lethargic, and when I woke up on Saturday morning he was dead. Recently dead--still soft and floppy, and not yet cold. Within half an hour, though, he began to get cold and stiff.
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An artistic woman saw my post about putting Louis to sleep, and she wanted to sketch my picture of him that was taken an hour before he died.



Her sketch is really good, and it captures Louis's habit of laying his head on my arm far better than the photograph does.

Screw dreaming of genies; I dream of guinea pigs. I won't bore you with the whole thing, but suffice it to say that all three guinea pigs were present, and it didn't occur to me once that two of them are dead now. I'm not sure what it means, but I can still imagine Louis with a fair amount of clarity. I know it'll fade in a few months or years, but for now I rather like that clarity of memory, which is unusual for me.

Also, in the dream, Chester jumped around and climbed from one part of the cage to another, and I was impressed by the quality of my internal representation: it's exactly the way he does jump, walk, and lie down in real life. The human brain is a magnificent pattern-learning machine.

Yesterday, I put Louis to sleep.

Here's the last good picture of him.

Never has this user icon, of Terry Pratchett's Death, been quite so appropriate. As Death says in one of Pratchett's books, "There is no justice. There's just me." That's ironic, since one of the great joys I find in Pratchett's books is that his characters do meet their just rewards.

But today, I am an arbiter of life and death, and money. Louis, my 5.5-year-old guinea pig, has a kidney stone and will die without surgery that will cost $600-900. If it was several thousand dollars, it would be right out, and if it was a couple hundred, I'd do it without hesitation. But he's a middle-aged pig, and I'm not sure I can justify spending a month's rent on him, and frankly I don't even want to have guinea pigs when I graduate. That's a lot of cold reasoning, and I know I'm kind of horrible for it, but I think I've made up my mind to not get the surgery. It's hard to look at him and know that I've sold him out for 1 month's rent, that I have held his little life in my hands and cast it aside, that he would live, but for me.

In general, I believe that if you can't afford to care for your pet, you can't afford to get a pet, and I've been good about taking care of them. But there's obviously a line somewhere, and this surgery is in a terrible gray area, and I think I've chosen the heartless but reasonable option.

Edit: the proper quote is, "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," from the Bhagavad Gita, brought to me by Oppenheimer's statement at the first nuclear test. In this case, the proper modification is, "I am become Death, destroyer of pigs."

Chester is doing much better. He eats and drinks, he's not lethargic, and his eyes aren't crusty anymore. It's not clear what it was, or what made him better, but I'm to keep giving him antibiotics (Baytril) for the rest of the week. I've stopped hand-feeding him (which he didn't mind so much, but which was a hassle) or giving him subcutaneous fluids (which he hated).

Over the past 2 days, I noticed Chester was drinking nearly nothing, and he wasn't eating much at all. He also seemed to be less active. It can be hard to tell, since he has massive amounts of hay to eat, so I can't really tell how much he's had, and maybe I just see him when he's sleepy, but it seemed pretty clear. I concluded that he almost surely had tooth problems--that's what his cagemate died of.

I took him to the vet today, and she said his teeth were fine. She did find a giant cyst under his neck, though--she used a syringe to take the fluid, and she'll do some lab-work to see if that identifies what's up. In the mean time, I'm to give him subcutaneous fluids (from an IV bag--I'm like a guinea pig nurse!), antibiotics, and hand-feed him.

But after getting home, he's been doing pretty well. He's eating and seems happy, so I'm hopeful. Maybe the cyst made swallowing painful, so he didn't eat much, and now that it's drained he won't have any problems. There remains a question as to what caused the cyst, but hopefully the lab work will identify that. And if he continues eating this well, I may not bother hand-feeding him--he does it much more efficiently than I ever could.

In any case, it's been a bit of an emotional roller-coaster. First, I was convinced the prognosis was bad, since he seemed to be following Milo's course, and Milo didn't make it. Then, the vet found it wasn't an obvious problem, and after she drained his cyst he started bleeding a fair bit. But now he seems to be okay--we'll see how it turns out.

I don't think they smell. Not much, anyway. But my roommate thinks my guinea pigs smell bad enough that he'd rather roast in the summer heat than open his windows and door. He said when he opened them the air did move through the apartment, but it smelled of guinea pig. Personally, I can only sometimes detect their smell--it seems to be right after they go to the bathroom. Otherwise, there's just a faint smell of hay. And it was over 90 degrees inside today, and it will be similar tomorrow. I'm rather insulted, to tell the truth, but there's not much to do. The worst part is that when he closes his room up, it doesn't just affect him--the whole apartment gets hotter, since the ventilation is pretty weak otherwise. But, my room is on the cool side of the apartment, so he's definitely hurting himself more than he's hurting me.

I've got a paper published in ICML 2008! You already know that, because I was already excited about going to Finland. But the final revision of the paper is finally complete and submitted to the conference, so I've put it up on my website, which you can see here. Yes, that means that my guinea pigs are now recorded for posterity in an academic conference.

Louis is a fool. He can (and does) eat his food from the top level, but sometimes he decides to reach for his bowl all the way from the ground level. It looks really awkward, but that doesn't seem to stop him.

You cannot tell me that this looks comfortable.

This morning, like last Sunday, I was awoken by wheeking. Chester was worried because I hadn't given the pigs their treats yet, so he called out wondering where they were. This is a new development--prior to this summer, the times I got up in the morning could vary by an hour or more. This summer, though, I've been very regular about giving the pigs their treats--after I get out of the shower, usually a bit before 9am.

On the one hand, this is very cute. On the other hand, it means that it's damn hard to sleep in on Saturday morning.

Both guinea pigs just bathed themselves at the same time. I don't think I've ever seen them synchronize like that before, so I chalk it up to coincidence.

This has to be the most trivial post I've ever made.

Louis was just scratching himself, and he was off-balance, so he fell over. That's not so uncommon, though it is cute. The kicker was that then he just lay there, like that's what he'd meant to do all along. Maybe that was because he knew I was laughing at him, though.

Last night I held Louis, and he did that thing where he sighs and lays down his head--onto my shoulder! It was completely adorable.

And Chester, who I held second, was enthralled by some scent, and just kept sniffing as I held him. When I whispered to him he jumped back in shock, but soon returned to sniffing.

Just today I told my mom that I thought our pig Louis wasn't coming down with mites after all, since he hadn't seemed particularly itchy since last weekend.

Well, now he's running around the cage itchy again. It makes me itchy just watching him. I guess he gets a vet visit after all.

EDIT: Holy crap this is stressing me out! I can feel the stress, and doing that breathe-the-stress-out thing helps a little, but there's an unhappy pig next to me making me feel bad! Even Milo, when he stopped eating, at least didn't seem so upset by his ailment. I know what it's like to have an unscratchable itch (I've had a cast on before), and to think that my dependent little pig has one is terrible!

Our guinea pig Chester doesn't like green pepper as much as I thought. As a result, he's still got some left now, at the end of the day. He just nibbled on some, but didn't spend long before he abandoned it again.

Well, when he went and sat by the bars where Louis was, Louis smelled the green pepper on his breath, and kept sticking his nose through the cage and sniffing at Chester's mouth--putting his nose right in there. Chester was a bit taken aback and licked or nibbled (I couldn't tell) on Louis's nose a few times, but Louis kept sniffing at him until Chester finally turned around and went elsewhere.

The high today is listed at being 85F.  I guess I should be lucky that the thermometer inside only reads 92F, but the one outside in the courtyard (not receiving direct sun, but getting close sun) reads 97F.  Tomorrow is supposed to be even hotter.  I may go outside and put up the blinds to protect our poor pigs.  Right now they're lying next to the ice in the cage.  Their cage is divided so we can separate them, and we have two blocks of ice.  They're lying in between the two, which puts them close together.

On the plus side, I cleaned the bathroom.  It was
a hassle, but I'm glad it's done.  Somehow, though, I seem to have turned the toilet bowl below the waterline a shade of gray.  I have no idea why, and I'm hoping it'll go away in time.

Chester was just dreaming.  His eye was open a little bit, and it was twitching all over the place.  That's kind of weird, because under normal circumstances guinea pigs barely move their eyes at all.  But it's good to know he dreams, and I hope his dreams are pleasant.

That said, his vacant, twitching eyes looked kind of freaky.

Louis, one of our guinea pigs, was sitting in his cage, eating his food.  I paused in my work to look at him, and I must have looked at him funny, because he suddenly fled as fast as he possibly could.  Because his cage is bedding on plastic, he didn't have very good traction, and so he scrabbled at it, flinging bedding all about while spinning his legs like a cartoon character.  It was tremendously funny, but when I laughed he made his frightened/warning rumbling sound.  Silly pig!

Damn, pet sitters are hard to find!  I had to call quite a few, but I found one.  Apparently trying to find one only a single week before Thanksgiving is a bad idea.