Mouse Medical Decisions and the Problem of Pain

First, here are the characters of our story: 

From left to right, they are: Sprout, Goblin, and Marigold. 

Next, a quick content warning: this post includes pictures of ailing mice including some with a visible tumor and blood. It also includes pet death. I 100% understand if you want to quit reading here.

Now, onto our musings. 

The first time Marigold got sick was in the spring of 2021. She was about nine months old. She had been moved into her own cage because she had a tendency to anxiously bully the others. Still, at this point, she would regularly get to interact with the others. The practice made them all so nervous, though, and eventually led to fighting which resulted in her permanent separation. 

Marigold had always been faster than a blink and, at nine months old, though she was still plenty small, she had rounded out a bit in adulthood. Then, suddenly, she slowed and started to shrink. She would chatter, too, which had me worried. 

This was an incredibly busy time in my life, despite the world being half-shutdown due to COVID. I was in love with the person who would become my wife. I was ending my seven year career at public libraries and entering the nonprofit sector. I was closing on a house. And my beloved mouse was wasting away. 

I worried she would die before I even had a chance to start working through the complicated decisions of medical care. 

Here are some signs that something might be wrong with your mouse: weight loss, ears laid back or to the side, and a hunching of their backs. Chattering suggests a raspatory issue. Lumps on their body might either be tumors or cysts--the former tend to be on their sides and bellies, the latter tend to be a little squishier. Scratching at their eyes or ears may suggest an infection. Scratching/chewing at their fur may suggest mites. Bloody stools or just blood in their cage point to something being amiss. 

Now, I am going to suggest something that may be unpopular with other mouse owners. Actually, I might suggest quite a few things that are unpopular with other mouse owners. What I need you to know first, though, is that I care a great deal for my little mice. I do my best to understand each individually and I do not take making medical decisions for them lightly. All right, here we are: I do not think there is a right answer for medical or end-of-life decisions. 

Some people will say "get your mouse to a vet ASAP" when you see signs of illness or injury. I don't know that that is always right. For one thing, finding a vet to see your mouse is challenging--depending on the area, you might find yourself with very few animal hospitals that are willing to see small mammals. The ones who do, often only have a vet or two on staff who treat small mammals and then you are at the mercy of their schedules. The cost and quality of care differs wildly, too. I took one mouse to a vet that glanced at the mouse, prescribed some eyedrops, and charged us $300+ for an appointment that lasted five minutes and during which the vet didn't even touch the mouse. Thankfully I have found other vets to be more caring and careful with my mice and more cost friendly, too. 

Last February, I very tragically lost my beloved pet rabbit. We rushed her to the vet during a snow storm, they recommended putting her to sleep, and she died as soon as they left the room to get the euthanizing medication. I wish we had either taken her sooner--if we had noticed the change in her behavior a day before, the vet might have been able to save her--or not taken her at all and allowed her to die at home without the trauma of the rush to the vet. What I'm saying is this: it isn't easy to make these decisions and, regardless of what really opinionated people on mouse-reddit say, there isn't always a right answer. 

In April of 2021, Marigold held on. I was able to get her to the vet. He gave me some medication that I could just put in her water bottle and encouraged me to leave it for a week or two. She got better. She stopped chattering. She rounded back out. She sped back up. 

She got sick again in October of 2021. I had hoped to take her to the same vet--he had been kind and charged me $15 total for the visit and medication--but I learned he had since died. I don't know that it was COVID related, but it's hard to imagine it wasn't in some way. COVID itself killed a lot of people and even more died as the result of overfilled hospitals and stretched medical resources. 

The second vet I took her to was a 40-minute drive from my house and charged me about $200. The medication they gave me for her had to be measured out and given to her twice daily. First, she would take it on bits of bread. Then she stopped eating the bread and we had to hold her still, dropping the medicine directly into her mouth. She hated it. 

That October, I went to Michigan to visit my friend and see her perform in Matilda. While I was there, my (now) wife took care of Marigold. They texted me on the first night I was there, worried Marigold wouldn't make it through the night let alone through to my return. She did, though, once again rounding back out and speeding back up. 

She was sick again by December. This time, I made a very difficult decision: I did not seek treatment for her. Going to the vet was miserable for Marigold. Taking medicine even more so. At this point, a year and a half old, she was considered a geriatric mouse which limited some of her treatment options entirely. Had the treatment from October pulled her through another month or two, I might have considered taking her through another round of medication. It didn't, though. The treatment that made her miserable took just as long--if not longer--as the time she had after treatment before illness took over again. 

She passed in January. It broke my heart. 

Now, I will jump forward in time. Goblin died suddenly just a month or two after Marigold. It was a shock and a trauma. She died in my hands after a seizure. It happened so quickly I didn't have the chance to even consider medical decisions. 

So we jump forward again. Sprout lived to be two years old. She was sweet and funny. She loved to run on her wheel. My wife liked to joke that she was in the silver sneakers. I had two other mice but both had that dreaded Y-chromosome so she lived alone after Goblin's passing. Sometimes, she would get little visits, outside of the cages, with either Merlin or Hex. She liked to be held. She would chatter some, conversationally, and we would often touch noses. 

When she started scratching at her ear, leaving droplets of blood around the cage, I assumed it was an ear infection. This was before I had settled on a vet I really liked. I took her 30ish minutes away. The vet took her out of the room, cleared off her ear, and brought back in a tissue. He explained that the irritant in her ear was, in fact, a tumor. 

Ears are not at all a typical place for tumors. In general, mice get tumors on their bellies and their sides--almost all connected to mammary glands. This tumor was growing in Sprout's ear canal. It was inoperable. The vet suggested euthanasia. "She's probably in a lot of pain," he said. 

I told him I didn't want to consider euthanasia yet; I wanted something to help her cope with the pain and feel less discomfort with the ear. He prescribed an oral pain killer and a topical treatment. 

I was really upset that the vet recommended euthanasia right away and without offering alternatives until I told him that I wanted them. This is one of the things that turns me away from some vets; it feels like an immediate dismissal of the pet's life and value. And from what I could see, Sprout still liked her life. At the time, Sprout was still running every day. She was still scurrying up to the top of the cage when she saw me, seemingly asking to be held. She still drank plenty of water and ate plenty of seeds. 

I talked about this decision on a mouse Facebook page and the swift response from numerous parties was that I should have listened to the vet. "Mice are good at hiding their pain," people said. "The kindest thing is help them over the rainbow bridge," people said. "I understand it's difficult but she looks like she's in pain," people said. 

Does pain mean life is no longer worth living? I am in pain almost every day. I have had painful headaches almost daily since my late teens. My wrists and elbows hurt. My thyroid is inflamed--my malfunctioning immune system keeps attacking it--and it causes my throat a good deal of discomfort. I have stabbing pains my uterus, dull pains in my back. My knees hurt, my ankles. Sometimes it hurts to walk. But I still enjoy my life. I eat food I like, hang out with my family, play board games with my wife. I write and I draw. I take walks with my wife and our dog. I write letters to my friends. I watch dumb movies. I listen to lots and lots of audiobooks. I shop on etsy and ebay for clothes to dress my Bitty Baby and American Girl Molly doll in. I make zines and I sell them. I hold my mice and my little hamster, or I just sit on the edge of my bed and watch them interact with the worlds of their respective cages. I text my wife pictures of our cats and look at the pictures of our cats my wife texts to me. And I enjoy all of it. Sometimes, I enjoy it enough to not think about the pain. Sometimes, I enjoy it despite noticing the pain is being exasperated. 

This is to say: I don't think the vet or the people on mouse-Facebook were right. I knew Sprout. I saw her every day. I loved her and I think she loved me in return. And for awhile, she was still enjoying her life, regardless of pain or discomfort. 

After that trip to the vet, for a few weeks, things continued the way they'd been. She was still running. She still liked being held. She still ate. She still drank. She was cute, she was sweet, she was funny. I could tell the end was coming and my big hope was that she could pass at home, on her own time. Then came a bit of lethargy and, with it, I started fearing coming home to find she had died. I would ask my wife to come with me when I went in our room to check on her because I didn't want to be alone if I found she'd died. On the last night of her life, though, what we found was worse. She had been scratching at her ear vigorously enough that it was starting to tear off. The next day, we went ahead and brought her to the vet to have her put to sleep. It was a very difficult decision. 

For both Marigold and Sprout, I wished I could have a conversation with them. "Do you want to try treatment again, to feel better for a couple of weeks? Or do you want me to just let you go?" I would have asked Marigold. "Are you still enjoying your life or is the pain making it intolerable?" I would have asked Sprout. 

People, I have found, have really strong opinions about these things and I do understand why. Having a strong opinion gives you the comfort of a binary right and wrong. Maybe in both situations, other people would have opted for euthanasia and done so earlier. Maybe others wouldn't have considered it at all. It has been a couple of years since both of those mice passed and I can still imagine having made different decisions along the way. Still, I don't think the decisions I made were wrong. I knew my mice and I paid attention to their lives. The decisions I made were not easy or taken lightly. Rather, with a great deal of consideration, I opted for the decisions that I thought would respect the value of their little lives and honor the quality of their lives.