Wise Beyond Your Years
I’m the eldest of four kids in a family of six, and growing up we had a beautiful albino chinchilla named Dusty. Dusty was an awesome little pet to have as a kid. Very sweet, never bit anyone, loved to cuddle and run around “digging” tunnels in the bedsheets. He had this really big cage in our guest bedroom that was connected to my room, and every time someone would walk past his cage, he would run to the gate hoping to be taken out.
If you opened the gate, he would just hop right into your hand. Anyway, great pet. So about three days after I got my driver’s license as a 16-year-old, I noticed that one of Dusty’s eyes was tearing a little bit, which I hadn’t seen happen before. Feeling like a brand new adult with my new driver’s license, I decided to take it upon myself to bring him to the vet and see what was up.
So, I put him into a brown paper grocery bag with his favorite blanket, made some air holes, stapled it shut, and strapped him into the passenger seat of my family’s van. Fast forward maybe a half hour and I’m sitting in the vet’s office holding Dusty and feeling like the most responsible adult ever. The vet is an exotic animals vet and takes a look at him, then asks to do an X-ray.
So she sedates him a little, does the X-ray, hands him back to me, and leaves the room. Adult level 9000 as I sit petting him until he wakes back up. So the vet comes back in and sits next to me on the little bench in the check-up room and starts petting him in my lap. She’s telling me how wonderful he is and how lucky I am to have such a great little pet, asking me my favorite memories of him, all this.
We are talking and finally I ask her something like, “Okay so how much do chinchilla eye drops cost because I’ve got to get going.” Her reply floored me. She smiles gently, saying something like “I wish eye drops could fix this.” She gives me a hug and starts to explain. Dusty was not bred responsibly and had some kind of internal deformity involving the roots of his teeth putting pressure on his eyes and brain.
This would eventually cause an early end. I couldn’t believe it. I remember starting to cry and putting Dusty back in his grocery bag with his blanket and asking if the vet had a stapler I could use to close it again. I paid cash to the receptionist from my babysitting money and got into my car, crying all the way home. When I got home I sat in the car for a while in the garage trying to gather myself as Dusty chewed on his bag.
Looking back I’m not really sure why, but in the car I decided not to tell my family the news. The vet said Dusty wasn’t in pain despite his tearing eye and we wouldn’t have to put him down. She didn’t know how long exactly he had left, but guessed maybe a year. I guess I figured I didn’t want my family to be sad every time they played with him or passed by his cage knowing his time was limited.
I wanted the rest of his little life to be normal. Eventually, I brought him back in the house and put him in his cage. I went later that day to Petco and bought rodent eye drops as a cover-up and “proudly” told my family that night how I brought Dusty to the vet to check his eye and lied, saying the doctor gave me eye drops and told me eye irritation is common in chinchillas. Dusty lived three more years after that, two years longer than the vet had expected.
He passed just shy of his 10th birthday. On the morning he passed, I told my dad what had actually happened at the vet. He told me I was so much more of an adult than I knew.