# Happy Birthday, Quillamina!



## Sela (Apr 10, 2010)

Today, Quillamina celebrates her second birthday. That's right, my sweet little rescue baby turns two today! I'm so happy to be able to share this day with Quillypig and with all of you, especially since, not all that long ago, I wasn't sure she would live to see her next birthday.

"But Sela, I thought you said she's a rescue! How could you know when her birthday is?" you may ask. The truth is, I don't know when Quilly's real birthday is. Considering that she was, unfortunately, probably a pet store hedgie, her last humans probably didn't know either. Since I was told she was nine months old, and it was mid-March when I brought her home, I decided that it was likely that she was a June hoglet, thus I chose the sixteenth for her birthday. I wanted to have a day to celebrate for her, since I'm so happy she was born.

For Quilly's birthday, I'd like to share her story with you. This little girl has overcome a great deal in her short life, and is much changed because of her experiences with her new family. In her birthday thread, you will come to know Quillamina, and perhaps see some pictures of her later, if I can find my camera. (It seems to have gone MIA, I'll have to do some hunting.)

My family was feeling vulnerable after the death of my grandfather, two days before I turned eighteen. My father, denied by my mother the beautiful Hyacinth Macaw he had been admiring, somehow got it in his head to look on Kijiji for a hedgehog. There, he found an ad for a hedgehog girl, nine months old, that was no longer wanted by the people who should have given her a loving home. After a week or so of nonstop research and pleading with my mother, and the typical child's promises - though from Dad, and not me - of 'I'll take care of her, I promise!' it was decided we would go to pick her up. A phone call and an address later, and we were off to meet the newest member of the family.

She was not what we expected. The hedgehog had never been handled, never been given treats, and in her entire five months of being there, had never been blessed with a name. Obviously, she was, to them, a novelty pet. Once the novelty wore off, they didn't want her anymore. There was no love lost as my father handed over the one hundred and twenty dollars for the hedgehog and all of her accessories and cage and we took her away. I held the hissing, quivering ball of spines in her little bed as we drove away to take her to my brother's house so he could meet her.

The first thing the as-yet unnamed hedgie did upon arrival was crawl into my shirt and ball up so tightly that I couldn't get her out. Panic ensued as I realized that a hospital visit might be in order for me if those teeth came out, or if the quills bit a little too deep. The angry creature was, in short order, removed from my shirt, though I had to tell my brother and father to look away and half remove said shirt to do so.

Things didn't improve when we brought her home. We let her be for a couple of days to grow accustomed to her new surroundings, and after that time had passed, we began to attempt handling our new prickly pet. We tried to get to know her a little before naming, wishing to see what kind of name would best suit her. Eventually, it came down to two choices: Quillamina, or the much less desirable 'Spiny Norma.' Fans of Monty Python will undoubtedly get the reference. I put my foot down there; no animal would bear that awful moniker in my house.

'Quillamina' it was to be! We thought she would warm up to us after a week or thereabouts; surely she couldn't stay angry for longer than that?

We thought wrong. Quillamina was the most hateful animal I had ever known. She hissed constantly, jumped whenever anyone so much as came near, and bit at every opportunity. Most hedgehogs won't bite, I know this, but Quillamina was not, and is not still, most hedgehogs. She was clearly fearful of humans after her lack of handling, but still we persevered. Dad and I would let her sit in her little spiny ball behind our stacked-up pillows as we watched soccer, and try to keep the loud celebrating to a minimum when Manchester United would score.

After months of this, Quillamina began to come around. Slowly but surely, she uncurled and began to explore her new world, at least what little of it was available to her. We couldn't let her on the floor, since we have cats and dogs who would have terrorized her, but we allowed her to sniff around on my parents' queen-sized bed and shamble around behind the pillows.

Alas, the best-laid plans of mice and men go aft astray; things didn't go the way we had thought they would. Instead of bonding with my father, the way we had anticipated, Quillamina chose someone else as her most-beloved person: me. As with the many cases of young children who leave the care of their pets to their parents, so too, did the care of Quillamina get left to me. We moved her into my bedroom once we realized it was too cold for her downstairs, and from then on, even though I told Dad he was welcome to come and get 'his' hedgehog when it was time for her to come out, he very rarely did. Is it any wonder, then, that Quillamina decided she preferred my company, the company of the person who spent the most time with her, whose room she shared? It wasn't that my father didn't love her; he loved her very much, he still loves her. Perhaps we were dealing with our grief differently; he, by shutting himself off, and I, by immersing myself in rehabilitating an unhappy, unloved animal.

Months passed and winter came. The Christmas season brought worries and problems anew.

Quillamina was sick. Christmas Eve, when I was giving her a bath, I noticed blood trickling from a certain spot on the female hedgehog anatomy. Seeing this, I immediately realized that something was wrong. We rushed Quillamina to the emergency vet, as our regular vet was closed, and waited for hours to be seen, only to be told by the doctor that he knew next to nothing about hedgehogs. He took a swab anyway and took it to the back of the office to look at it under a microscope, despite the fact that he was not a pathologist. 

When he came back, the news was bad. The cells he had gotten from the swab looked cancerous. Of course, he could be wrong, he told me, since he wasn't a pathologist. But my brain being the jumbled mess of chemical imbalances that it is, I could only focus on one word: cancer.

Christmas Day, a day that is supposed to be a happy one, I was miserable. I refused to leave Quillamina alone when we went to the house of my brother and his wife to exchange gifts. My poor, sick hedgehog came with us so I could keep a close watch on her, as if I chose to stay home, my parents would not go either, and I couldn't ruin Christmas for everyone else. As it was, I wouldn't be going to my grandmother's house for dinner, since she is a chain smoker and I didn't want to expose my already unwell pet to the fumes.

On the way home, disaster struck. Quillamina had moved her bowels in her carrier, and there was blood everywhere. Perhaps the straining had caused the blood flow, I didn't know, and I didn't care what the cause was; I wanted to get my pet to a doctor right away. We had stopped at a corner store on the way back home, and the instant my mother got back in the car, I told her we were changing direction and going to the emergency vet, in hopes that there was someone else there that day who actually knew what they were talking about.

They couldn't help us. However, they said they knew of someone who could. We were sent ahead to Mississauga-Oakville to the emergency vet there, having been told there was a specialist there, and that the London emergency vet would call them to let them know we were coming.

There was no specialist. The person we had pinned our hopes on didn't exist. Not only that, but they didn't know we were coming. They had not been called, and they could not help us. All they could do was send us home with anti-inflammatories for poor Quillamina, a treatment my mother had asked about at our own emergency vet, and was told wouldn't help.

The wait for King Animal Clinic to reopen at the holidays' end was agonizing. They did not reopen until after New Year's Day, and every day I feared that it would be Quillamina's last. After days of syringing medicine into my sick pet's mouth - and getting more of it on her than in her, as she fought me at every turn - we were able to take her to our own vet and finally get the answer we wanted. They would perform a hysterectomy on Quillamina, and hopefully, that would save her life.

I had a horrible feeling the night before her surgery that she wouldn't be coming home. Thankfully, I was proven wrong. The surgery was successful, and she awoke quickly with no adverse effects from the anaesthestic. The removed uterus was to be sent away to the lab in Guelph for testing, to see just what had caused my piggy to fall ill. Meanwhile, I had to towel Quillamina twice daily for a total of four daily doses of medicine, take away her wheel, and watch the incision to make sure nothing got stuck on it and to see that it remained clean.

A short time later, the test results came back. As we had suspected all along, Quillamina had been battling cancer. Doctor Jennifer Hopper had saved her life with that surgery. There were no traces of it left inside Quillamina's body; she was going to live, and she would be just as healthy as she had been before she got sick.

She healed quickly, and now the only sign of her surgery is a little knot on her belly, covered in the fur that seemed to take forever to grow back. I will never forget the fear that I felt at almost losing my baby. If not for Doctor Hopper and the staff at King Animal Clinic, (and maybe, just maybe, if not for my own swift reaction) Quillamina would not be with me today, on this, her second birthday.

On her birthday, nearly six months after her life-saving operation, and more than a year after her adoption into my family, Quillamina is a changed hedgehog. No longer the quilly ball of anger and hate we brought home with us that day, she is now content to snuggle in her birthday present, a handmade blanket complete with her name embroidered in the top corner. She loves petting, tolerates being kissed, and constantly begs for attention to be paid to the most important thing in the world: her. Even the vet, who saw her first shortly after we brought her home, has noticed a change. Quillamina is now, apparently, the best behaved hedgehog the vet has ever seen. She still refuses treats from my hand, but we'll get there. All in good time.

When all is said and done, Quillamina has helped me just as much as I have helped her. Her need for resocializing helped my channel my grief over my grandfather into something constructive. When I learned that I had panic disorder, Quillamina made the transition from beloved pet to therapy animal. Having, on her own, changed her sleep schedule, she dutifully goes places with me when I feel I cannot cope on my own, curled up in her pouch that I hang around my neck.

You may say that I changed Quillamina's life...but the truth is that she changed mine.

Happy birthday, Quillypig. I look forward to many more.


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## LarryT (May 12, 2009)

That story has tears in my eyes.
Happy Birthday Quillamina


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## jinglesharks (Jun 15, 2010)

Happy birthday Quillamina! What a wonderful story, I'm so glad you're little hedgie is still with us today. Kudos for being such a caring companion for her, and vice versa


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## Beanie (Jun 9, 2010)

Happy birthday Quillamina!! This story was amazing, and I'm so glad she's still with you!


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## tie-dye hedgie (Dec 19, 2009)

Have a fantastic birthday Quillamina! What a touching story, she's quite the little trooper.


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## Sela (Apr 10, 2010)

Quilly thanks you all for your birthday wishes, as do I. <3 I don't know what I would have done if the cancer had taken her, but thankfully, that's not something I have to worry about anymore. We're both lucky, I think.


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## hedgielover (Oct 30, 2008)

Thank you for sharing her story, and yours. It was very touching.


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## PJM (May 7, 2010)

That was such a touching story. Thank you for sharing it.


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## cynthb (Aug 28, 2008)

That was a wonderful story; thanks for telling it. Give her a birthday snuggle from me


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## EryBee (May 23, 2010)

Happy birthday Quillamina! You both are so lucky to have each other in yours lives! I hope she has many more happy hedgehog birthdays.


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