Weekly Spotlight Question: "Broken Tail on a Rat??"

(submitted on Yahoo!.com by Anonymous. SpellCheck/edits have been made) 

              "So, a few weeks ago I found my rat Bella in her cage and she had an apparently broken tail. The tail was cut halfway open and all bent(!!!!) and blood and white stuff were coming out of one part of her tail. She was screaming/squeaking and hunched over by her tail. 
I put her in a "hospital carrier" with needs like a bowl of food, a water bowl, an ice pak, and a towel and Critterzzz...(TM)bedding. 
My mom thought it would be ok to try 2 put a fabric bandage on the tail to stop the bleeding. We don't have any rat-savvy vets around here so we looked on a pet website and NEOSPORIN was a good choice. It was doing fine until one day I found a crispy black brown tip on her tail. It was all  hard and droopy where the normal pink park and the black part met. Now more black and brown stuff is spreading towards the base of the tail!!!! Help!!!"


   To say it simply, the rat's tail is decaying. Open flesh quickly gets infected. A rat's tail is very fragile, and the soft, delicate skin is like a baby's. Imagine that left with open, bloody flesh. Although NEOSPORIN can still help the tail's injury, it isn't as powerful after using it every day. Sadly, this means that you will have to either allow the vet to remove the tail, or if he or she is a senior rat, he will be too old to perform surgery on, and this means he will have to be put down."