The Internet Mocks and Heals My Pain

After returning home from viewing Sneakers' body and having a good cry, I wanted to just be numb for a while so I found a flash game on the internet I hadn't played in a while. It requires no strategy or any real thinking - just moving around and picking up things.

When the page loaded up, there was an animated advertisement at the top of the page for a personalized credit card. It started out with the face of a guy and some sort of animal that I couldn't quite tell what it was - or even that it was an animal. The text in the ad changed, telling us about all the great benefits of having this particular card - in first person voice as if the guy in the ad was talking to us (I can do this; I can do that). At the end, the pictures changed, and the words changed to, "And I can even put Reggie's picture on it." A credit card with a picture of a ferret on it then dropped into the picture.

I laughed and cried at the same time.

R.I.P. Sneakers

My ferret, Sneakers, passed away yesterday. About a month ago, I noticed he was getting very obese for a ferret so I took him to my normal clinic thinking maybe he had something in him that was preventing him from passing food as quickly as ferrets normally do. Unfortunately, the vet that has worked with my ferrets before had moved on, and the new guy told me he was just fat and needed to exercise more, and unfortunately, I believed him. So for about a month when the weather was okay, I would take him out in the front yard and have him walk around and follow me, and I cut down his food amount, but he still got fatter. Two nights ago when I checked on him, he was making whimpering noises – or the ferret equivalent of – so I stayed up most of the night with him and took him to a different vet who knew what she was doing and took x-rays. Unfortunately, I was right as it turns out he had a really large tumor that was pressing on his various organs, and we decided to operate, but he was too weak and passed away during the operation.

He was a good ferret. I got him and two others at the same time from a family who could no longer keep them. The girl in the bunch, Luna, passed away in an accident she got herself into, and his cage mate, or possibly brother, I never knew, Socks is still left. Sneakers was the skinniest, fastest, and the one always wanting to play of the three of them, which makes it all the sadder for me that he died like this, in a physical state completely opposite of what he was supposed to be. When I viewed his body, I was happy to see that he still retained the spark in his eye that he had in better days. He wasn’t the climber Zowie was, but every now and then he would get up in the armchair up on the sides of it, and for whatever reason he would just stop and look out over the living room, and the imagery was of that of a lion high on a rock looking out over his domain. I always laughed when he did that.

These are the best photos I have of Sneakers. I’m going to miss him.

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