It's Colorado in Texas!

I'm absolutely amazed at all the snow outside right now - and I'm pathetically glad I don't have to be outside in it anymore today. Anyone who likes snow has obviously not had to be out in it much. Unfortunately, taking my comp time today didn't exempt me from going out on the road. I drove as much today as I usually do in a month.

I took Bear to the vet today, sort of hoping that all he had was an abscess. The vet took some fluid, looked at it, and decided it was probably a tumor. With a tumor, the only options are surgery to remove it, or letting it continue to grow. Even a benign tumor can eventually interfere with internal organs and movement. Since they'd had good success with doing surgery on older rats in the past (my fear was that Bear would be considered too old for surgery to be safe), I decided to go for it.

It's going to be a rough next 10 days. Bear had not one, but two lumps removed - a tiny one on his thigh and a larger one on his shoulder. He can't reach the sutures on his shoulder, but he already managed to completely chew out the ones on his thigh. Now he has staples there, as well as an E-collar to keep him from messing with them. I'm hoping that overfilling his food bowl will allow him to eat with the collar on, because I don't relish the idea of having to take the collar off and put it back on several times a day. He'll probably have to live in his small carrying cage for the next 10 days, until the stitches can be removed, because I don't like the idea of him going up and down the ramps in his cage while he's got the collar on. I'm crossing my fingers that everything heals up ok, without any infection.

I'm exhausted and hoping that it snows and snows until the library is declared closed tomorrow. All that driving in this weather, while simultaneously worrying about Bear, wasn't very restful. Also, when I went to WalMart to pick up some stuff for Bear, I locked myself out of my car and had to walk home and back again to get my spare car key (I've already thanked my dad for advising me to keep a spare house key in my wallet). I was not, unfortunately, very well dressed for the weather, so I think I'm going to drink some Throat Tea and hope I stay healthy.

I hope everybody stays safe!

(Oops, just remembered that I have to finish up an LOL blog post for tomorrow. I've got one almost finished, but I hate it. Maybe I'll finish it up and schedule it to be published anyway. --Update: I wrote an entirely different, holiday-themed blog post, but I haven't yet trashed my original post.)