November

Kali has been on the heart medication for a week now. She doesn’t seem to be any better. Some times she is quite bright, active and interested and other times she is withdrawn and looks miserable but all the time she is working very hard to breath. I was very worried about her yesterday because she wasn’t eating anything but last night she finished all her food and even cracked the sunflower seeds out of their shells and ate them. She hasn’t bothered with the sunflower seeds for a couple of weeks.

I have put her in her holiday house and changed her bedding just in case there was anything in her house which she was having a bad reaction to.

Yesterday another kind rat owner sent me a link to the APOPO website. This is organisation which is training pouched rats to sniff out landmines (the rats do not get harmed). The site is fascinating and includes a half hour movie of the rats being trained. The commentary is in Dutch but its quite easy to follow what’s going on and the rats are great fun to watch. The movie file is nearly 300 MB in size so you’ll either need to be on broadband or leave it to download overnight!

I had a call from my vets yesterday. They had received the reply from the zoo vets who had been consulted about Kali. They asked me to fix an urgent appointment and to be prepared to leave Kali with them for the day.

We had the appointment this morning. the feedback from the zoo vets was not very encouraging. They were not able to come up with a firm diagnosis but thought that Kali might have a heart problem. They suggested a more detailed x-ray of her heart and a further blood test. They also suggested that my vet should try to draw any fluid off Kali’s lungs and abdomen as this should make her breathing easier. To do this we would have to anaesthetise Kali again and this would be very risky because her breathing was so bad. We decided that we would put Kali on a course of heart pills and see if they improved her condition. The vet also took her off the antibiotics and instructed me to slowly wean her off the steroid. She had been on both these for a very long time.

I’ve been casing my vet for feedback from the referral for the last two days. Unfortunately the zoo vets have not yet replied. I don’t know how much longer Kali has. Her breathing has continued to deteriorate and there are times when she is really short of breath. She can get quite distressed when she is running about and trying to be active.

She is still eating, although she has to pace herself so that she can breath too, and she is generally still interested in life. She is fighting this illness hard but she seems a little worse every day.

Sadly the recent improvement in Kali’s health have been short lived. Her breathing problems have continued to get worse so we’ve been back to the vets today.

The vet is referring Kali’s case to a group of zoo vets to see if they can provide a diagnosis and suggest possible treatments. This group were the ones who diagnosed Kali’s zinc poisoning last year. The vet has also prescribed Kali a course of diuretics in the hope that they will reduce any fluid build up in her lungs.

Following on from Kali’s very active playtime on Sunday she’s continued to be more active. She has been very noisy during the nights again recently. I can hear her crashing about in her cage, climbing on her ropes and shelves and pushing her food bowls about. During her playtime last night she was, thankfully, not as hyper as she’d been on Sunday night. She spent quite a lot of the time washing but she also played with her ball again and spent some time exploring and finding her treats.