Saturday, February 17, 2007

hamster history

I got my first hamster when I was in grade one. Her name was Sarah, and she was pregnant. We didn't know that of course. She ate half her litter. Five survived and one was named E.T. after the movie. Yeah. He became the mascot of the third grade classroom at O'Kelly Public School.
My second hamster was Samantha. I got her when I was eleven. She escaped into the piano in the living room and we took the whole thing apart before we found her, somewhere between G and F#. Like many other female dwarf hamsters, she developed cysts on her hamster boobies. Very gross, but she was too cute for it to matter. She was my best friend for FOUR YEARS.
My third hamster, concurrently with Samantha, was Gabrielle, after Xena's hot sidekick. She was diabetic and pregnant. She died shortly after her litter was weaned. There were ten of them at the start, but three died. She was unmemorable because she was extremely unfriendly, but one of the babies, Jenny, was heartbreaking to give away.

My fourth hamster was Saffron. She got a sort of fake pregnancy, and died shortly thereafter of a horribly common hamster ailment, wet-tail, which is like diarrhea but way worse. I nursed her for weeks, until I saw she wasn't having fun anymore. The day I stopped nursing her was the night she died. I've never stopped wondering if she could've kept living. That's a lot of responsibility in eighth grade. While she was alive, she was a good friend. She'd sit in my hoodie pocket while I read for hours on end, never peeing, never getting squirmy.
While I had her, I had Paddington, a greyish teddy bear hamster we rescued from an unloving home. He was very very sweet, but his eyes kept sealing together. He escaped for three weeks once, and turned up FATTER than when he'd left. My brother's creamy teddy bear, Theodore, escaped around the same time, maybe hearing the food was good. But he came back sick from some poorly chosen ingestibles.

After Saffron, Aberforth. Aberforth was a very cool grey colour. He was always small, and when he was just a year old, his testicles got sucked back into his body because of a cancerous growth in his groin. Yeah. Poor bugger.

A year later, Sofi, another dwarf, also bought pregnant. I kept one of her twelve daughters, Magnoli, but she escaped once during a backyard play session and was never seen again. Sofi was the prettiest of hamsters, and like Samantha, developed cysts on her boobies. More experience and education meant that for two years, I drained these cysts with a syringe every month. Sadly, she died of wet-tail like Saffron.

I added it up, and I've had rodents for 3/5ths of my life. Hamsters make up eight years of that. I am not meant to exist without a small animal. It's just not meant to be.

Twelve days until Poo arrives!

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