Misunderstood by Rachel Toor

Author:Rachel Toor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374303099
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

Fern (top) and Laurel in their sleeping hut

The Rescuer

What kind of person has forty-three rats?

Iris and I settled into our new home in Spokane.

I put her cage in the second bedroom I used as an office and propped it off the floor to avoid drafts. I created another set of steps out of books leading to the door so when I opened it she could come and go as she pleased. I put her travel cage in a corner of the living room as a litter box. She liked to pee and poop in there.

We adapted our routines to the new space. Mornings I’d get up early to open her door, we’d go to our separate places to pee, and then we’d meet in my bed and snuggle for a couple more hours before I went to work. I invited my colleagues and students to come over because Iris loved visitors. During a birthday party for a friend, Iris leaped onto the coffee table and tried to make off with an entire cupcake. A naughty story for my mother! The house had a fireplace I never used that Iris loved to explore, often emerging looking more dirty than the pre-ball Cinderella.

One night we were playing Flying Squirrel. If you’re not familiar with this superfun game, here’s how it works: Iris would stand on her hind legs, hook her armpits over my fingers, and gaze at me. I would zoom her around, letting her stretch her back. Sometimes I’d hang her above my mouth and kiss her big pink feet. But on this night, as I held her face in front of mine, I saw she had a lump on her cheek.

A lump.

She’d been spayed at Cornell that summer precisely to stave off the possibility of tumors. Was this a tumor? How could she have a tumor? She was only nine months old.

I went to the Internet to find a vet in my new hometown and nabbed an appointment at seven the next morning. I didn’t sleep that night.

Keri was like many vets: an articulate, attractive woman who clearly loved animals. But she looked young. I knew enough doctors to know that medicine is as much an art as it is a science. A lot of treatment has to do with a physician’s ability to develop a good gut—a feeling for disease. You get this by seeing many cases. I worried this nice young woman hadn’t been out of school long enough, or treated enough rats (admittedly not the most popular pets), for me to trust her with my baby.

So I asked. Without getting defensive when a semihysterical rat mother quizzed her on her experience, Keri told me she saw lots of rats, often the pets of the elderly or infirm. They were, she said, easy to care for and, as we know, loving and responsive and clever and wonderful. Plus, she said, one of her clients had forty-five rats, so just working with that woman, she’d seen a lot of different problems.

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