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Pets are a pretty common part of life for a lot of people. Dogs, cats, hamsters, fish, whatever – many people have some kind of pet.

Laura and I have different pets. We have all kinds of crazy pets – three leopard geckos, four ferrets, a fish tank, a dog, and Laura has had rats. I have had a pet for about 5 years that was always my go-to guy when I wanted to show off the collection – Spike the hedgehog. Spike was a handful of prickly cute attitude. If you woke him up, he was fussy and curled up into a ball, but once calmed down he was the perfect gentleman of hedgehogs.

Spike hadn’t been acting quite right lately, and while we had a vet appointment scheduled, it just wasn’t soon enough. I came home from work the day of the vet appointment to find that he had died that day.

Laura had just purchased a new camera lens for Christmas, and we had said on new years day (our fifth anniversary of getting Spike) we were going to get him out and take a bunch of pictures with the new gear. We were tired on new years, and almost didn’t do it, but I really wanted to, so we got him out, gave him a bath, trimmed his nails, and took pictures until he fell asleep, totally exhausted from all the excitement.

That was Tuesday. When we came home from work on Thursday, I went to get him out to take him to the vet and found that he had died.

He will be missed. It took him three of the five years I had him to get him comfortable coming out during the day, but the past few years he’s been coming out during the day, eating, drinking, and running in his wheel all in broad daylight.

We had to do something hard this week: Rascal (affectionately nicknamed ‘ferrito’,) our oldest ferret and newest addition to the clan, had to be put to sleep.

It’s sad – he’s the first pet that I’ve ever had to put to sleep. I never had pets as a kid, so this was the first time. He’s been riddled with health problems for quite some time now. When we first adopted him, he had an enlarged spleen and was always a little, uh, explosive when it came to the litterbox.

Recently, we took him to the vet as it seemed like he was losing weight and his litterbox problems seemed to be getting much worse. The vet put him on some medicines, including an antibiotic, prednizone, and pepcid ac. She also determined that he probably had insulinoma, which was basically a tumor on his pancreas resulting in critically low blood sugar. He had a few low sugar crashes, and we had to snap him out of it with karo syrup more than once, but otherwise he seemed like he was getting better. The medicine worked great and within a few days his litterbox issues were under control.

But then the bizarre happened – a week after the vet visit, he suddenly became totally paralyzed in his rear legs, also meaning that he had no bladder/bowel control. We moved him to the pet carrier where we could keep him from hurting himself (the ferret cage is multi-leveled and over 6 feet tall) and took him back to the vet. She said that there could be half a dozen different things that could be causing it, but at long as he was acting like our ferret (stealing tennis balls and try to run away) we should continue to work with him. We did – for a long time, he would still steal tennis balls from us, and try to run away, scooting his little ferrity ass behind him as he tried to run.

We had to clean him up about 3 or so times per day, and give him some clean bedding each time, but he was doing OK. I left for our family vacation to Mexico the last week of May, and Laura took care of him while I was gone. When I came back I could tell something was different. Not only had he lost a huge amount of weight – he was seriously nothing but skin and bones – but he was weakening, he was tired, and he wasn’t happy. We couldn’t get him to eat his food, eat his treats, or even steal a tennis ball, and that’s how we knew it was time. A few days later we took him out to the vet and had the little fella put to sleep.

It was sad, but it was time to do it, and everyone knew it.

This picture is the reason why Laura was able to convince me to adopt Rascal & Kylie:

Come on, look at the melon on that guy! It’s huge! Not to mention the ferrett pot belly… Rascal was our gentle giant – you didn’t have a choice – you HAD to like him!