Some folks know that my only male rat, Irvine, caught a life threatening cold over the weekend. With rats an illness can go from barely noticeable to lethal over the span of a day, and Irvine went from being a little sniffly to gasping for air in the span of a day.

I'm blessed to have made friends with a local rat expert that we all call Bella, who has taught me all of the things a rat owner can do. It's because of her that I keep Baytril on hand (a pet antibiotic) and drinking syringes along with tools and supplies to administer medication and keep a rat comfortable. Irvine spent the weekend in my hospital cage under a heating pad and having mentholated steam blown over him to help clear his lungs. He was refusing food but I got him to drink Ensure from a syringe in small doses. Ensure is a high nutrition and high calorie drink, which is an excellent thing for a rat who won't eat or drink. It's like chicken soup I suppose.

This threw my plans to regulate my sleep schedule out the window, but my pets have a higher priority than my sleep. I seriously thought I was going to lose him but my night watch over him seems to have turned him around.

What you see here is Irvine as he is today, strong enough to grasp the syringe and greedily drinking down Ensure. My hospital cage is padded with towels to help the rat be comfortable wherever they want to lie, and I keep the heating pad underneath it to keep a rat with low body temp warm. They also have access to food and water if they can bring themselves to eat or drink, otherwise I pull them out and try to get them to take their meds and to drink from a syringe.

Irvine thanks you for all of your good thoughts and prayers.

(If you would like to see Bella's webpage on rat health and medication, check out http://ratguide.com/ It's a bit technical but has a lot of useful stuff in it.)