My Little Buddy is in a Bad Way

Serious one again. I hate serious ones.

Far be it from the Slog to only post about those suffering from cancer, but my remaining rat, Dante is on his last legs. He was recently diagnosed with a malignant, aggressive sarcoma. It's been over a year since I lost my last rat, Dante's little brother Wilson, to a sudden respiratory condition, and it hasn't been any easier this time around.

This time around, I refuse to write a post when Dante passes on, though. While he's still here, I'm going to talk about my special little guy, and why he's my favorite pet rat of all time (and I've had eight of them in the last 12 years).

I got Dante (and his brother Wilson) about 2-1/2 years ago (I'm guessing here, my personal sense of time is a little screwy), when Ali and I were in the early stages of dating. Ali had just lost her own rat, Ezzie (short for Esmerelda), to mammary tumors (a common occurence in female rats at a certain age).

As I usually say when faced with an impending rat death, I swore up and down, "I'm never getting another one. Never again. They don't live long enough, and it's just to hard to watch this."

So, of course, we ended up getting two rats within weeks.

The backstory: Ali and I were picking up food and bedding for her chinchilla (we have a lot of animals. A lot) when we happened to go by a cage with 4 male rats frolicking about. They all had really great personalities, and we were hard-pressed to tear ourselves away from the cage.

We left the store, ran a few more errands, and realized we forgot something. We went back to the pet store to discover that two of the rats were gone. We mentioned to an employee that at least the person who bought them knew that rats, who are social mammals, do better in pairs.

"Ugh," said the employee. "I hate when people buy the rats here for snake food. They're intelligent animals. It's sick the way people feel the need to feed snakes live food to watch, when you can get them prekilled items, which are healthier and safer anyway."

Ali and I looked at each other. As one mind, we said "we're getting them."

So, we ended up with two rats. We justified our purchase with the statement, "At least they're male. We won't have to worry about mammary tumors" (which are, more or less, breast cancer for rats). We decided that each of us would name one. Ali, named the (much, much) smaller one "Wilson," which I have always assumed was after Dr. James Wilson on House, MD. I named the lumbering, gentle giant Wilson shared a cage with "Dante," after the Medieval poet, not Dante Bichette as some of you no doubt expected.

We lost Wilson last June, but Dante lumbered on, getting fatter, lazier, but friendlier all the while. He is, by a long stretch, the friendliest little (huge) rat I've ever met. He would, if you let him, spend literally hours licking your hands and grooming your nails (rat ways of showing affection). He spent almost any other moment out of his cage engaging in the curious rat behavior known as bruxing, a tooth grinding that is roughly akin to a cat's purr. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say he is the friendliest pet I've ever owned.

And the laziest.

Lord, how he loved to just sit there on your lap, or chest, or shoulder and be petted. Take any other rat I've ever had out of the cage, and within minutes he or she had explored the entire area around, and probably wouldn't sit completely still until every fun thing was exhausted, and it was time to take a nap.

Then there's Dante. I think in the past two years, Dante never went more than two feet away, and inevitably waddled back to his starting point, to be petted and scratched between his shoulder blades (which he adored - I don't think he could reach there, otherwise). He often dozed off while I sat with him watching TV - and I often came close to joining him.

But there is one thing the little guy has shown more love for than sleeping: eating. He could pack it away in better times. Clever little guy that he is, he figured out that if he banged on the roof of his cage in the late evening, it would remind me that it was feeding time...so he started banging earlier and earlier every day. His feeding time started creeping sooner and sooner. By the end, he was usually eating a full two hours earlier than he did at this time last year.

He also took advantage of my ADD-ravaged memory to, on more than one occasion, trick me into feeding him twice in one night. I spent much of the last year complaining bitterly that the rat was going to be softball shaped before much longer.

Given that he was always a fat, male rat, his current condition is particularly hard for me to bear. He's lost a lot of weight, and has a ghost of his old appetite. His former lumbering gait has turned into a limp (surgery scars and and a series of abcesses near his pelvis, combined with the stunningly fast reappearance of a tumor have rendered his back legs nearly useless). And the ultimate cause of this? A mammary tumor. That's right. The gentle giant of a rat that I used to pretend talked like Barry White ended up having more in common with Quincy Jones. And now he looks small and frail.

I'm going to go home tonight and take him out, let him sit in my lap and give him a scratch between the shoulder blades. Maybe a little baby food will perk his taste buds up a bit. When he passes, which won't be long, you won't hear about it here. I'm going to talk about Ghostbusters or sleazy Glam Punk bands or Stan Lee's progressive views on females next time I log in to blogger. But I had to get this off my chest, and this lunch break seemed the best time.

I love you Dante. And you are the last. This time I mean it.

It's just too hard.