Mammary tumours in hamsters

I can’t believe I’m writing another post about a sick hamster but unfortunately that is the case. We adopted Lucille just over a month ago from a hamster rescue in Fife. Unlike our previous rescue hamster, Lucille was young and we were hoping to have at least a year of healthy hamster with her.

Lucille is a Roborovski dwarf hamster and they do not like being handled so they are recommended as an observational pet only. They are also the smallest of the different hamster species averaging just 5cm in length. They are incredibly fast and can run 6 miles a day. This is the behaviour we observed from Lucille over the time we’ve had her; she would only come out and night and spend hours running on her wheel. She would run and hide whenever she saw us although there was one day over a week ago when I managed to hand-feed her a seed so I felt we were making progress.

Then early last week she starting coming out in the day to have a drink. This was unusual and I probably should have got suspicious but it was only about the 3rd or 4th day that I noticed a massive lump on her abdomen. She obviously needed a vet but I seriously wondered if that was the right thing to do given how stressful I knew it would be for her. She’s also very difficult to catch because she’s so fast and so little. But somehow I managed it and got her to the exotic pet vet early on Thursday morning.

The vet gave the worst news: it was a very aggressive tumour given the speed with which it had grown and how big it was. She gave me three choices: surgery to remove it, euthanasia, or do nothing and let her go downhill slowly and die. Lucille was showing no other signs of illness and still full of energy and young so I didn’t want the euthanasia option and having just watched a hamster go downhill slowly and die I wasn’t keen to do it again. I felt there was no other option other than to remove the lump.

This vet is the only exotic animal vet in Aberdeen and sees everything from lizards and frogs to parrots and hamsters. She’s very busy but she fitted Lucille in as an urgent case the very next day – last Friday – due to the aggressive nature of the tumour in the hope we might get it before it had metastasised.

Poor little Lucille, who hates humans, hates being handled and hates being awake in the day was dragged to the vet against her will on Friday morning. It’s very risky performing surgery on such a tiny creature, especially to remove a huge tumour which will contain a lot of her blood so I was impressed the vet agreed to it although I had to sign a paper accepting the fact there was a risk of death but I’m sure every pet owner has to do that before an operation. Both the vet and I felt Lucille is still young and looks well aside from the lump so she was a good candidate for surgery.

Early on Friday afternoon the vet phoned to say Lucille had made it through surgery but she’d like to keep her for a few hours and to come and collect her later in the afternoon. I was thrilled she’d made it. But then the vet phoned about an hour later to say Lucille had gone downhill and she wasn’t sure she’d still be alive by the time I came to collect her. So I said I wanted to come right away to at least bring her home and let her die in a familiar environment.

Lucille was still alive when I arrived at the vet but her heart rate was low and she was not very responsive. She’d weighed 28grams before the surgery and the lump weighed 5grams. That’s how huge it was. She was in her little vet carry cage without any hide because they wanted to observe her but I knew she’d have hated that so I quickly covered the cage with my jumper, bundled her into the car and played Mozart’s Adagios on the way home. By the time we got home she had perked up a bit. I’m not sure if it was anything to do with Mozart or getting away from a noisy vet practice with the sounds of dogs barking but I was so happy just to get her alive and back into her cage.

The vet had told me to keep her warm but the minute I put her back in the cage she dashed into her sand bath where there’s a little house and hid inside that. Sand is really cold not to mention all the sand grains getting stuck into her wound. What a disaster I thought. But I didn’t want to move her again so left here there for several hours to sleep. I remembered whenever I took Rocket home from the vets after having abscesses cleaned the first thing he did was roll the wound in his sand bath. It must be a hamster thing and Roborovski hamsters live in sand deserts.

Later that evening when she was looking the same but no worse I decided to move her into her paper bedding where I hoped it would be warmer but as I tried to pick her up she dashed away – probably a good sign – and ended up in her water bowl! My attempt to warm her up had backfired and now she was all wet. In the end I decided to leave her alone and just put the heater on in the room for a bit. Then I went to bed and hoped she’d survive the night.

She was alive on Saturday morning and definitely perkier. I had to give her some antibiotics and pain relief so I held her while Ben tried to squirt the medication in her mouth. I’m not sure whether any made it in and she quickly leapt from my grasp and nearly landed on the floor. It is practically impossible to give her medication. The vet had said I could put it in her favourite food but her favourite food is red millet seeds which are miniscule.

Yesterday afternoon she came out to eat and ate quite a lot so she must have been feeling a lot better. I even managed to get some photos.

This morning I can see she’s been active overnight in her cage as things have moved around and there are lots of fresh prints in her sand bath (I smoothed it out before I went to bed). I’ve had to take her wheel out temporarily as the vet understandably doesn’t want her running 6 miles while her wound is heeling. She also started burrowing again which is very natural hamster behaviour. It must be easier to burrow now without that massive lump on her belly.

Lucille is not out the woods yet. There’s a risk of infection which is probably higher given how difficult it is to give her antibiotics. Plus it was an aggressive mammary tumour – breast cancer – so there’s a high chance it will come back. If it does we won’t put her through this again. The vet said she tried to get all of it out but could not be 100% sure although she did say it came away from the body very easily. We also didn’t send off any biopsy to a lab as that would have cost an additional £180 and there didn’t seem much point. It’s not like hamsters can have chemo or radiation anyway. It would have been purely for academic reasons. Don’t get a hamster if you think it will be a cheap pet.

The vet wants me to take her back this week so she can inspect the wound but I’m not keen to put her through the stress again so I will send photos instead unless the wound looks infected. I’m crossing my fingers and toes that she makes it through the next week.