Apparently, unbeknownst to me, the release of Starcraft 2 in 2010 was a big deal. It was a big enough deal that my dear Long Suffering Boyfriend (LSB) announced that sleep was for the weak and that as soon as the game was available he was going to play it until he passed out from exhaustion.
I was a new graduate veterinarian at the time, and I was pretty close to passing out from exhaustion most nights. Why anyone would do that to themselves was beyond me.
He’d moved in with me a few weeks earlier. It was wonderful, just being able to coexist in the same home without one of us being expected to be somewhere else by morning. Everything was good, even doing laundry was romantic because all our socks were mixed in together. Ah, young love.
But I was working 12 hours days in the vet clinic, and he was yet to find employment in Tasmania. I generally tried to not take my work home with me, but on this particular occasion a cut, furry face got the better of my as yet un-cynical heart.
I had brought home a little baby bunny, somebody’s new pet who had stopped eating thaat day.
Rabbits, for a number of reasons, can get Gut Stasis. When their intestines stop moving, they stop pooping, they stop eating and…
… they shuffle off this mortal coil.
Part of treatment involved force feeding the rabbit every two hours. I was expecting a long night ahead of me with broken sleep, and an even worse day tomorrow due to exhaustion. All for one adorable bunny.
But along comes my LSB to the rescue. He’s enamored with the tiny bunny, making ‘daaaw’ noises over its little ears and then becoming horrified when I explain that it’s here not for funsies, but because it might die.
He was yet to understand just how often animals die in veterinary medicine.
So I fed the bunny with the syringe, which is a special undertaking for the unprepared. A tiny baby bunny is still capable of being a bratty bunny and fighting the syringe of life-giving food which is being squirted into its mouth. Still, I persisted and fed the little scamp.
Any my LSB thought it was adorable.
After I explained that I would be waking up every two hours to feed the little thing, my dearly beloved offered to feed the bunny himself, since he’d be awake for a while anyway, and set me an alarm two hours after he went to bed. I very gladly accepted.
When I awoke the next morning at my normal time, I initially thought something was wrong, but there was no boyfriend asleep beside me.
He was still playing Starcraft II. The bunny was eating out of a bowl.
He’d fed the little baby bunny at the end of every Starcraft level, approximately once an hour, until the rabbit had got tired of the syringe and started feeding itself instead. And there were three tiny poops in the cage.
