 Hi everyone! Welcome back to the Tiny Herd where we talk about everyday pet care for guinea pigs, rabbits, and other small animals. Today I thought it would be fun to do a little update with you guys while I clean the mouse cage. So I haven't really given you guys an update since I got the mice and introduced them and that's really just because there's been a lot going on with them. If you haven't seen the first video introducing the mice, just a really quick overview. These girls are about 2 years old so they are senior mice and I'm not talking about them a ton on my channel just because I don't really know how long they're going to be around. This was very much a retirement home situation but there have been some medical issues going on with Milky Way so I thought it would be a good idea to share that because it's just part of the reality of having pets. So I hope you guys enjoy getting to see this little time lapse cleaning video and let's go ahead and talk a little bit about Milky Way. Alright so we got these girls at the end of January I believe so we've had them for about 2 months now and I would say about a week and a half, 2 weeks after we got the mice we kind of noticed a little bit of a lump, like a very small lump on Milky Way's side and I wasn't really sure if it was maybe like a cyst or something with her skin so I kind of did some research and I actually found that tumors in older female mice are very very very common so I kind of just approached it as this is probably what this is. We kind of just let her hang out instead of taking her to the vet since she was so old and we kind of knew already what it was. I had a conversation with my vet and she kind of agreed and we decided that unless it was causing her an issue we were just going to let her live out the rest of her life pretty much. Well over time so I would say over 3, 4, maybe 5 weeks that tumor actually grew really big and you guys will see towards the end of this video I'll show you some footage of the mice before I put them back but it got pretty big it does kind of limit her movement at this point which we'll talk about that but just to continue the story here I talked to the vet she agreed that it would be alright to just let her live her life with her sisters since she was so old and instead of doing anything drastic well we let her you know just exist the tumor on her side was growing it was growing you know all the time growing pretty quickly it got really big and eventually I noticed that it seemed to be starting to swell underneath her eye and obviously that would be a major issue so at that point we did take her to the vet because I of course didn't want her to be in any pain I didn't want her to have any actual you know real issues with this tumor growing on her side with it you know causing her pain causing her issues not being able to eat anything like that so when it started to seem that it was swelling underneath her eye we did make an appointment and we took her in for the vet to actually see her and at that point we kind of decided that the eye was actually an unrelated situation we're not really sure what caused the initial irritation to her eye but at that point with her being at the vet we did put her on pain medication and then we also got an ointment to put in her eye to try to control the irritation that was going on and unfortunately the ointment that we had did not end up solving the irritation issue I actually got her out one morning to well I went to get her out to give her her medication and realized that her eye had pretty much just it she couldn't close it anymore and I don't want to be gross but it was in really bad shape and I kind of knew at that point that her eye probably needed to be removed because she would have been in a lot of pain if she hadn't been on pain medication already so at that point I took pictures I sent them to the vet because she just flat out didn't have any appointments available but she said send me the best pictures that you can I will definitely look at them and at that point we had a conversation that we could either do surgery or we could keep her on put her on a little bit stronger of pain medication and just keep her comfortable and at that point since she's two years old we just elected not to do surgery with her I didn't want the end of her life to be paying from surgery so we decided not to do that so we put her on stronger pain meds and we put her on antibiotics so to try to get her eye to heal basically and crazy enough her eye actually has healed for the most part it's almost completely closed it's still a little bit swollen but with her being on antibiotics still it is still healing and she is on pain meds like I said so she's not in any major pain or anything like that so that is really the entire story of Milky Way's cancer basically we didn't have it sent out to be tested but we're pretty confident that it is cancer based on how quickly it has been growing so she has an eye she only has one eye basically at this point the one has healed almost completely closed at this point and she does have a very very large tumor on one side of her body but since she is on pain meds the vet decided with us I mean we had a conversation that it was perfectly reasonable and acceptable to keep her on those pain meds as long as she is coming out to eat and drinking and moving around and all that and she does all that I'm I see her come out and get breakfast every morning she comes through a water bottle she still gets around so basically what I'm doing at this point is just giving her pain meds and antibiotics every day and setting up her cage in a way that she can't lose her balance and fall off of anything fall and hurt herself has easy access to climbing up onto the platform with her food and water so I just pretty much make it easy access for her at this point so this is actually a pretty good conclusion in my eyes because I would much rather let her stay at home and live out the rest of her life with her sisters in this environment that she is comfortable and familiar with instead of having to take her to the vet because we did think we were gonna have to make a hard decision to let her go at one point and luckily with the antibiotics and the pain meds her eye did start to heal it has almost completely healed and she is actually just the same happy little mouse that she's been the whole time that we had her so honestly came out with the best case scenario in this situation but I wanted to share that with you guys and I will show you what she looks like as well because this is kind of the reality with having pets sometimes especially when you have senior animals vet costs come up crazy medical situations come up and it was a little bit overwhelming for a while trying to make sure that she still had a good quality of life so I hope you guys enjoyed getting to see me clean the mouse cage and get this little update on Milky Way let me know what you guys think down in the