Good News/Bad News

Ok, so the bad news first. That's how it goes, right? We noticed that Spaz (that's what we named our hamster) was not happy and was getting more lethargic and depressed looking each day. She also smelled horrible and wasn't eating. So we took her back to Petco on Saturday to see what was up. Turns out she had wet tail, the hamster version of diarrhea. I felt horrible when the salesperson told me that she probably got it from us not washing our hands before we touched her or something like that. I already was sick and was hopped up on cold medicine so I got kinda weepy when we decided to just return her and have her treated in the store.

The good news is that we picked out a different hamster and brought him home. Well, Adam kind of picked him out because I was scared and sniffling. He picked a male that was kind of running up to the glass begging to be taken home. On the way home he got ahold of one of the air holes in the box and almost chewed his way out. I had to cover the hole he ripped open so he wouldn't escape into the car. While we cleaned out the cage and washed everything off to make sure no wet tail germs remained, we stuck him in the old cage where he preceded to chew on anything he could get his teeth around. When we got him into the new cage he explored for a bit and then went to work chewing at various parts of that cage. It was decided that "Chewy" was an appropriate name because it's apparently his favorite pasttime, followed closely by obsessive cleaning and food hoarding.

He's being a much more normal hamster with a healthy appetite and frisky personality. This leads us to believe that Spaz probably was sick before we got her here and it just got worse over the week we had her. This doesn't make me feel completely better, but it helps.

He's cute too... and he's scared of me, just like Spaz was...