The Day Einstein Tried to Scare me to Death

Einstein is...well, he's Einstein.  Incorrigible.  Mischievous.  Pain-in-the-ass.  Totally insane. 

Over the weekend, he decided to try and kill me. 

We did introductions with the new guys (Ginji and Ban) on a Thursday night.  The basic philosophy behind rat introductions involves gently traumatizing all of the rats by putting them somewhere new and scary (like a bathtub, or a patch of floor they've never seen before), then encouraging them to bond by offering food.  The rats unite against the common, scary enemy, chow down together, and forget to be territorial. 

This works equally well with humans. 

Anyway.  In our case, the "new and scary" was the bed, and the food was a sesame-seed-covered-soynut treat, the likes of which you can buy at most pet stores.  I've actually tried them, and they are in fact pretty delicious.  What?  Don't judge me. 

Einstein apparently agrees with me that they're delicious, as he spent the entire of the night eating them and ignoring the rats he was supposed to be making friends with.  He ate all of the treats I gave him.  He ate all of the treats the other rats dropped or forgot about.  Then he snuck over, found the bag, and ate a few more. 

Einstein is not a very big rat.  There's not a whole lot of room in a tiny little rat belly for all of those treats.  And, come to find out, soy causes gas.  This shouldn't come as much of a surprise to me -- I've experimented with tofu, after all -- but I hadn't foreseen this as being a problem in advance. 

So imagine my terror when the next morning I open up the cage, and Einstein seems to have ballooned overnight!

I haul him out of the cage and started poking and prodding, then hauled out all of the other rats I own to confirm that, yes, his belly is definitely bigger than the others.  Not hard, precisely, but firm, and distended.  Naturally, I panic.  My mind immediately starts churning with all kinds of terrible thoughts.  What if it's an internal tumor, like what Velvet died of?  What if he's having some kind of internal bleeding or hemmoraging?  Maybe he fell and burst an organ! Maybe his kidneys are infected and swollen! Maybe he's dying!

There's no vet appointments until the weekend is past.  Sure, I could take him to the emergency vet, but they're not exactly rat-friendly and could even do more harm than good, or at least charge me a lot of money to do nothing.  I panic some more.  I apologize to him for every bad thing I ever said.  I start crying, because I had always thought maybe Einstein was going to live forever: He's always so energetic, and full of life, and insane. 

Reluctantly, I put him back on the cage, although I ran back to peek in on him every few hours.  He was always the same.  A little sleepy and lazy, but no signs of pain or distress. 

The next morning, I hurriedly pull him out of the cage, and find....

....That he's totally, completely back to normal. 

The moral of the story:  Don't eat your body weight in soy nuts.