Krycek

This is my favorite picture of Krycek...the way she's posing so proudly in front of that dome of newspaper she so carefully constructed. She was in her prime: it was the end of October 2001; I'd had her for about two months. She was starting to get fat on yogies and peanuts and came out to play everytime I opened the cage door.

This is her first picture, her first night home. I don't know exactly how old she was; I got her from the Humane Society with her sister Rizzo, and they estimated their ages at a year to eighteen months...middle-aged for a rat. I named her Krycek after the X-Files character, and if you watched the show you know Krycek wasn't very lovable. I admit my Krycek wasn't very lovable either, at first...she didn't like being touched and used her teeth to make that clear. She never bit me hard enough to really hurt, but she wasn't as playful or social as I'd hoped. I noticed that her tail, rather than tapering to the elegant point that most rats have, was shorter and blunt, and I wondered if she'd had some unfortunate mishandling somewhere along the way that made her wary of people.

She did warm up eventually, though. She never was a ride-around-on-your-shoulder rat, but I did have her eating out of my hand.

In fact, she'd eat out of my hand, off the floor, out of Rizzo's bowl if she could get to it...she had a hearty appetite, and it showed.

In the spring, I found a lump on her shoulder. I had read that tumours are almost inevitable in female rats as they age. The vet removed it; the stitches and the antiobiotic afterwards clearly were not to her liking, although she healed well. But the day before she went back to the vet for her post-op appointment, I felt another lump about the size of a BB in her abdomen. The vet and I had a heart-to-heart talk, and I made the difficult decision to forgo more surgery and let her live out the rest of her life as comfortably as possible.

The tumor grew, but didn't slow her down much. I was afraid that she wouldn't make it through the spring...then the summer...but for weeks she didn't even seem to notice it.

By September the abdominal lump was larger and she had a second one on her chest. She couldn't jump to her balcony anymore and needed to use a ladder, and she definitely had less energy. As she got slower, she also mellowed...her cage was next to my desk, and as I sat at the computer she'd come out just as far as she needed to to be petted and, of course, fed treats.

As the tumors grew, she lost weight, although her appetite was as good as it had ever been. I read that three ways to assess a rat's quality of life were eating, mobility, and grooming; her mobility was diminished but not gone and she was still as fastidious as ever. Still, it was hard every time I petted her and felt her spine, because I knew we didn't have a long time left. Both tumors were larger than golf balls and I was amazed she could move at all.

The weekend after Thanksgiving I subjected the pets to a photo shoot for Christmas cards. Krycek didn't want to come out of her nest, so I brought Santa to her. That next week, I woke one day to find blood in her cage, apparently from the larger abdominal tumor. She didn't miss a beat, eating and drinking and rebuilding her nest when I cleaned out her cage and filled it with fresh paper towels. The open wound remained, though, and bled off and on. I took her in to the vet and came home without her...it was a tremendously hard decision, but he assured me it was the right one. I had longer with her than I'd expected, but I guess it's never long enough.

Rest in peace.
7 December 2002