My previous hamster died from wet tail. Before that I never heard of the disease. This is the story of Nibs, my second hamster…
It had been maybe two or three years since I had my first pet hamster. One Sunday afternoon, after a lot of earlier begging, when my family was in the same room, I asked if we could please go to the pet store and get a hamster.
My parents thought about it and decided that it wasn’t a bad idea at the time. So, since we still had the cage from our last hamster, we got it out, washed it, and put it together. By now I was so excited and hyper that as soon as we finished the cage we hopped in the car and drove to the pet store.
We ended up buying a young, female, golden hamster, and we named her Nibs (it’s a chocolate word). We got home, put Nibs in her new clean cage and just watched her settle in for couple of minutes. I wanted to show off my new hamster so we loaded the cage with Nibs into the car and headed out to my Nana’s house.
A few days went by and Nibs seemed to be enjoying her new life with us (sleep a few hours, get taken out to be played with, and repeating that over the course of the day).
Maybe half way through the same week we got her I started to notice Nibs acting strange. She wasn’t as active and playful as she used to be, and it seemed like her backside and tail was always wet and sticky. I told my parents that I thought Nibs was sick and should be taken to the vet but they assured me that nothing was wrong.
Still worrying, I went onto the internet and typed in the symptoms she was having and one thing came up every time, wet tail. I copy and pasted an article and emailed both my parents. My mom agreed it was something to look into so she did some more research, finding a medicine called dry tail that you put into your hamster’s water. We bought the medicine right away and started giving it to Nibs as prescribed, but it was too late. On the next Sunday, exactly one week after we got her, Nibs died. I was very sad.
My dad called the pet store to see if we could get a replacement. Then we found out that Nibs, and all the others hamsters there, were already being treated for wet tail at the pet store. If we had known we could have continued the treatment, or responded faster when she showed symptoms.
The pet store had a warranty and gave us a free hamster in return for what happened. This time we continued the medicine for a few days and tried not to stress the new hamster as much. Now Pookie has been with us for almost a year.