Cringe-worthy

As (some of) you know, Mom's been taking care of my guinea pigs for me since I moved to Florida last summer. We lost Fancy a couple of months ago, due to--well, let's just say not entirely natural causes.

Today, Mom took the surviving guinea pig, Pumpkin, to the vet to have her nails trimmed and teeth trimmed down (a lesson learned from Fancy's unfortunate demise). On the way home, Mom stopped at the store to get some bedding for the cage. In Michigan, it was in the 60s and not even sunny (or so she claims), so she figured it was okay to leave Pumpkin in the car while she ran in. (You see where this is going, right?) While in there, she decided to pick up "a few more things" and, allegedly, wasn't in there for more than maybe 30 minutes--again, what she thought was an acceptable amount of time due to the cooler temps.

Or not so cool, as the case may be. When Mom got back to the house and put Pumpkin back in her cage, she (Mom) noticed that she (Pumpkin) felt kind of warm and was breathing "kind of shallow." Mom put the fan on her to cool her down but, when she didn't begin to perk up, she called the vet (the vet they had just left, oh, an hour ago), who told Mom to bring Pumpkin in.

Upon arrival, they took Pumpkin in the back right away. One of the employees came back out a while later. She told Mom that Pumpkin was in shock, that they gave her a shot of something (steroids, I think) to kind of jump-start her again and had her in a shallow pan of cool water. "But it doesn't look good," the vet assistant said. (Mom, of course, is hysterical by this time.)

Mom was on the way to the nursing home (Steve's dad, her father-in-law, is not doing well and, from what I hear, isn't really expected to improve at this point, so thoughts and wishes go out to Missy, Nikki, Steve and the whole family), so she gave the vet her cell number. At one point, not too long afterwards, she received an update from the vet that Pumpkin seemed to be perking up but was warned "not to get her hopes up."

About an hour after THAT, she received another call. Pumpkin had died.

Mind you, Mom had called me once earlier that day--on her way to the vet, asking what kind of bedding was bad for guinea pigs. (There's a particular wood one, either pine or cedar I think, that has oils that irritate a guinea pig's sensitive skin AND aromas and dust that interfere with their breathing.) Then I received a 2nd voicemail from her, about half an hour later, sobbing and telling me to "call her right back about Pumpkin." My first thought was, "What the hell kind of bedding did she GET?!"

Instead, she was calling to tell me about The Incident. When she called me, it was after Pumpkin was in GPICU (yes, that stands for Guinea Pig ICU and yes, I made it up) but before she went to the Big Bedding Pile in the Sky. Mom, of course, was distraught with guilt over what had happened and sobbed through, oh, the whole conversation. It was hard to know what to say--I was, of course, midly perturbed (to say the least) that she had, um--well, that my guinea pig was no longer alive--but I knew she didn't do it on purpose. "There's nothing I can say at this point to make you feel better OR worse," I finally said.

In her defense, 1) she's always been a little crazy and 2) Pumpkin was already elderly in guinea pig years. If she were younger, she may have been able to bounce back.

Nonetheless, that makes 2/2 guinea pigs who have died of "unnatural causes" in the last couple of months. Hmmm.

(No, in all seriousness, Mom is one of the biggest animal lovers and champion of animal rights there is, so I know she feels horribly about this. But....30-45 minutes?! SERIOUSLY?!)