Hamster CPR!!!!
If you have a child, particularly a girl, don’t kid yourself about keeping family secrets. There are none.
Girls tell each other everything, and most of those girls then go home and tell their parents. That’s why Hubs and I know all kinds of things, from which mom is hiding sex toys in her nightstand to which couple cleans the house naked together when the kids are away.
Now that the girls are getting older, the information has taken a more serious tone. We know who’s started drinking again. Who smokes pot with her kids. We know whose marriages are in serious trouble and whose have just ended.
And we know who attempted to give her hamster CPR.
First off, if you don’t know about my history with hamsters, let’s just say we’re like Paris and Nicole. We don’t like being in the same room together, and if we were, I would totally not be above sending the hamster a “Good luck, Bitch” cookie.
So you can imagine how, um, excited I was when a little sister of one of the girls’ friends brought her pet hamster to a soccer game for Baby to pet.
“Isn’t he cute?” Her mom asked me happily.
“It’s all right, I guess,” I said noncommitally. My pro-hamster husband, after all, was sitting right beside me.
“We actually have two hamsters,” she confided. “But the cage turned over last night and we haven’t been able to find the other one.”
“Oh!” I said loudly, elbowing my husband. “So your hamster got out and now you can’t find it! I understand that happens A LOT with hamsters! And then they get into the heating vents!” I dropped my voice to a dramatic whisper. “And they… DIE.”
“I know,” the mom said sadly. “We’re hoping to find Fluffy before that happens.” She then proceeded to tell me a long history of hamsters she had known, from the pair she’d had as a child (who met their end by contracting some nasty disease) to the series of hamsters her best friend had bought for her own child (death by: dog, escape, dog, dog, apparent suicide by exercise wheel), to the poor little hamster owned by a neighbor down the street (squeezed to death by its zealously affectionate young owner). I countered with the story of the gerbils my brother and I owned for a few weeks. One of them ate the other, effectively ending my family’s brief pet rodent experience forever.
Eventually, thank God, the soccer game hamster was put away (but not before Baby had found and carefully examined several of his poop pellets in the travel box, leading to her impromptu baptismal in hand sanitizing gel). After the game had ended and we were on our way home, I mentioned the missing hamster to my 13-year-old.
“You’ll have to ask Allison if there’s a strange smell in her house in a few weeks,” I said. “One of her hamsters is missing.”
“They got more?” she asked curiously.
“Well, they just bought two,” I said.
“They had another one a few months ago,” 13 said. “Allison’s little sister dropped it on its head, and then her mom tried to give it CPR. But it didn’t work.”
My mouth hung open. I’d listened to that whole long history of hamsters and Allison’s mom had left out the most fascinating story of all? How on earth could she have omitted HAMSTER CPR? Did she think I wouldn’t find out?
Of course I’d find out! Hello! I know everything about everyone, thanks to my little spies!
I’ll never be able to look at Allison’s mom again without imagining her valiantly trying to breathe life back into her hamster.
Which is fine, because she probably can’t look at me without imagining me singing to my, ahem, secret karaoke mix CD in the car at the top of my lungs.
>Hamster CPR? Good God. I just threw up in my mouth. Blech!
>My daughter had a classmate in elementary school who bred hamsters. They even went to SHOWS with the nasty little varmits. I had no idea that there was such a thing.
>good lord. I would consider giving CPR to my cats or my dog though, so I guess I can’t really say anything. They are my babies.But to do it to a rodent…gross.
>Hamster CPR?Good luck with not overinflating its lungs!Hmmm…Ask your daughter to find out if the hamster made any noises just before it died.Noises like…*POP!*
>My rodent experience was bad as a kid. We had gerbils, and I tried to pull one out of the cage by the base of its tail, but I grabbed the tip, and TORE IT OFF. God, that was awful.
>Thanks for that reminder, I better get a lock for the nightstand then. ;-)You are so funny!! I’d love to be your neighbor. And to see what stuff you’ll come up about us. Probably none, b/c we’re pretty boring people.
>lindsay, once we left our two goldish, action jack and goldie, with our british neighbors. we came back to find them belly up in a one inch sea of fish food. they looked at us beseechingly and said, “we tried to revive them”. um hum. did this involve the heimlich manouever? and i had a hard time focusing on the rest of your story as all i could think of was the naked cleaners. adam and eve, bustling round the garden? “A, you get the weeds, i’ll get the twigs and rotten squash…” come on people! join a nudist colony! do you really want to see your husband shuffling around in the buff with the hoover and a dust mop? how bout you? wanna windex the porch furniture with your rear to the world? not me! what if there were a clorox spill or something? out o’ luck. cleaning clothed is challenging enough, and certainly NOT provocative. we can only wonder about their childhoods…
>This totally reaffirms my household ban on rodential pets. YUCK! No disposable pets!
>My kids’ hamster escaped into the wall via the hole in the baseboard heating. My husband, trying to get him back, drilled a fist sized hole in the wall while my back was turned. When the drill hit the insulation and started spinning around the bit my kids freaked, thinking he’d hit hamster and started yelling, “DAD’S KILLED CREAM PUFF! AAAAH!” He couldn’t even get to it after the hole was drilled because there was a 2X4 in the way.
>That was really funny, and oh so true! There are no secrets when a person has daughters (my son is pretty good at bringing home stories too). I am constantly shocked by what my oldest daughter tells me about her friend’s families, so I imagine they must find our family shocking as well.
>My daughter is just beginning to transform into a little spy for us. Some of what she tells us about her friends families can be very amusing. But I am constantly reminding her that what happens in our house stays in our house. Don’t think she listens though…And the hamster bit…Well, when my sis was ten she had two gerbils. She put them in an icecream pail while she cleaned the cage. They managed to climb out of it and in her haste to catch the damn rodents, she tripped on her socks. Down she fell. And each knee landed on a rodent. She stood up, and there they were, just a twitching. I laughed (like any twisted sister would) and she asked me to perform CPR on them. Didn’t happen. Because I couldn’t stop laughing at the image of her killing her beloved rodents…
>Secret Karaoke mix? How that’s something I want to hear more about! I can get into that a lot more than any of this hamster talk. LOL
>We had to give CPR to our kitten a few months ago. It didn’t work. But CPR on a small animal is not as gross as it sounds. It’s done with a straw.
>On the way home from buying my brother a hampster, we left it in the cardboard box and ran into Walmart to buy some hampster supplies. It chewed out of the box, and escaped into the van. Several days later we smelled a terrible smell. We took it to a mechanic but they couldnt get the dead hamster out. We had to drive around with the gaggifying smell of dead hampster in 100 degree weather all summer long. Horrifying childhood memories. *shiver*
>omg, the footage running in my head of how that must have looked is KILLING me! lmao!
>Ewwwww
>I don’t have much love for the rodent pets either.I will second Kristen’s “ripping the tail off of the gerbil” horror. My sister ripped off the tail of her gerbil as a kid causing all sorts of trauma. My kindergarten brother sobbed “This is the WORST DAY of MY ENTIRE LIFE!”, causing my parents to actually take “Princess” to the vet to have her tail sutured. That’s right — five dollar gerbil gets 35$ operation.Oh, and then later “Timpani” the gerbil ate two in a horrible massacre, and the other one escaped only to be mauled by the cat. Ick.
>Hmmm, how did that work? Did she have to use a juice box straw?
>CPR on a hamster? I have now heard it all.
>BLAH!What’s on the karaoke CD? I have a very old karaoke tape in my car, and I’d COMPLETELY forgotten about it til you mentioned this. I can’t wait to drive my car tomorrow!!
>cleaning naked when the kids are away?! Why cant my kids ever go anywhere between 4 of them someone is always home. 🙁
>This post came at the perfect time for me. My youngest son’s birthday is approaching and he is lobbying for, you guessed it, a hamster. I have an instinctual aversion to rodents but have been weakening in my determination never to own another one (we briefly had one, a hand-me-down hamster that died after a few months of natural causes, i.e.old age) Ick, blech, phooey.
>My children once found an abadoned 3-5 day old kitten under a shed. When I made sure the mom was not coming back EVER, we took it in and nursed it through it’s infant days. I had to feed this tiny thing with a medicine dropper several times a day and it would occasionally choke and cough. Well, one day it had a very hard time recovering and instinctively, now brace yourself b/c this is the gross part, I placed my mouth over the kitten’s snout and sucked, yes, SUCKED, out the liquid that was causing it’s soon to be death. Of course, my next action included gagging and spitting to expel it from my own mouth. I was surprised at my efforts to keep that animal alive. We didn’t even end up keeping it; in fact, I never even had the slightest intention of keeping it. Long story short, we found a nice home for him and he grew up into a healthy kitty. I don’t hate cats, but they certainly aren’t my pet of choice. I wonder if I’d do the same for a hamster. Probably not.
>I find this topic very disturbing.
>Yeah. I realized that the Paris/Nicole comparison would freak some people out.. Sorry Anonymous.
>SO much to look forward to…I guess you can make sure you’ll not share a drink (out of the same cup) with CPR woman..
>I know all about teens who tell their family’s secrets. I am a teacher in a small private school, and believe me, I know much more about some of my students’ parents than I ever wanted to. Makes teacher-parent conferences interesting, though–sometimes it’s hard not to smirk. (P.S.–the word to verify is suuhk. Coincidence?)
>Hey– my sister’s hamster ate my hamster. And my mom gave our schanuzer mouth to snout when it had a seizure, but a hamster is a different animal entirely!
>ewwwww…..ew! ew!
>ok, gross!My daughter’s are begging me for a hamster…. no, no, no, no, no! That would be no way – not in our home… NEVER
>Now I’ve heard everything!Our 8 year old asks me at least once a week to get one. I get shivers just thinking about those things.
>Oh gosh. What’s on my karaoke CD? Embarrassing! “Torn.” “Goodbye to You.” “Landslide.” Dido’s “Thank You.” To name a few.
>Gross. No mouth-to-mouth with rodents.
>This reminds me of my kids black molly – it died while it was huge and pg……so they all watched while I did a c-secion on this dead fish! yep we saved about 10 babies and the kids learned alot but would I do it now….no way!
>Okay, okay, okay, I realize I am about to showcase my “rodent nerd” credentials, but HAMSTERS SHOULD NOT BE KEPT IN PAIRS. (Actually, hamsters should not be kept at all, given that they are vicious little idiots, albeit cute, but they are ingrained in Western culture). In the wild (which in their case is the Iranian desert), hamsters live a solitary life. They come together to couple during mating season, but they soon part. A normal adult hamster encounters other hamsters ONLY when seeking out sexual partners at mating time. If a breeding pair is kept together in a cage, they will normally eat the babies… because it is so abnormal for hamsters to be kept in family situtions.Allison’s mother clearly has no clue about hamsters.
>p.s. I realize I am about to nauseate the regular readers of this blog’s comments section, but an ideal pet for small children is a rat. Rats are social, sweet, bright, and very forgiving. They should be kept in pairs, and they can live happily off table scraps. The problems are (a) getting over the prejudices and (b) getting used to the tail.
[…] Hamster CPR!!!! ‹ Suburban TurmoilSep 25, 2006 … >Hamster CPR?Good luck with not overinflating its lungs!Hmmm…Ask your daughter to find out if the hamster made any noises just before it … […]