TW: potential pet death, pet tumours, illness, suicide mention, mental health mention

I have four rats. I love them all equally, but there's one that I bond with more than the others. That one is called Luna.

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This is gonna get long, by the way.

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I got her, her two sisters and her mother around July/August of 2017. The kittens were around 2 months old at the time (so are now roughly 17 months old, so almost a good year and a half) and the mother was 9 months at the time (so now about 24 months old, so roughly 2 years old). They literally saved my life. I had depression from a young age and, just after getting the rats, found out I actually had bipolar 2. Anyway. As you can imagine, I'm rather up and down with my moods; rarely I'll be fairly happy, more often I'll be numb, even more often I'll be downright depressed. I'm also (now rarely) suicidal.

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At the time of adopting those rats, I was at one of those bad suicidal moments in my life. In a shit job, with a shit agency job as an occasional second income, single as my sister moved into her partners house, and there was some crap or other going on at home, as always. So, while I was at this job the agency put me on, I decided to browse Gumtree.

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So I go on Gumtree, search "rats" (I'd wanted some for about 11 years at this point), and the first thing that pops up is something along the lines of this: "Mum and 3 daughter rats to go to good home. £50 for all four, cage and some food included. Oldest is 9 months old". So something like that anyway.

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I immediately message the seller, then I text my parents and BEG to get these little, adorable babies.They cave, thank god, and I pick them up on my way home from work that day, with the help of my dad. The second I held them, I fell in love. I named them all the second we got the cage set up, started giving them treats and made sure they were comfy and threw in some old towels as temporary bedding.

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Fast forward to now, there have been accidents and vet visits galore, plus a change in cage, food, bedding and a lot of other stuff. I love them more now than I did that first day. Luna, as I said, is my special girl. She always kisses me goodnight (on the nose, it's adorable), and climbs on me when she gets the chance. The only problem is, Luna has three tumours. She's had them for a few months now and they're just getting bigger. It's incredibly likely that I'm going to have to get her put to sleep sometime in the next month or two, as she's a lot more tired than she used to be, and she's only about middle aged so it's definitely tumour related. She's too thin (runt of the litter) to get surgery to remove them and, anyway, the risk of removing three is far greater than the risk of removing one.

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I, obviously, don't want to say goodbye to her. I will, because I love her and I don't want her to be in pain, but I'll be broken about it. Putting her down will kill a huge part of me that, frankly, I don't think will ever heal. I know that sounds melodramatic but honestly, like I said, I have a special bond with this kitten and we're practically inseparable when it comes to free-roam time.

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So yeah. That's my "off my chest" post. Granted, it technically isn't something I couldn't tell anyone in my life, but I went on about the rats so much the first few months of having them, and then one broke her leg and another had an eye removed and the one that broke her leg hurt the same leg again and trust me when I say I talked about that a fair amount cause I'm a first time rat owner and I was WORRIED damnit!, that I think everyone is sick of me moaning about any of their ailments.

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Sorry about how long this got. Once I started writing, I really couldn't stop. I love my babies - hell, my username is because of them! - so this has been bugging me for a good couple weeks when I first noticed her declining slowly.

Thanks for reading, I guess.