That Big Kid Ellen #100: Keep a tamagotchi alive
One of the gifts that I received at my dinosaur-themed birthday party this year was an old-school, Generation 1 tamagotchi. My friend/former co-worker, Alex, had read the Big Kid Ellen list and gifted me a bunch of things that I would need in order to complete a bunch of things on the list. A tamagotchi being one of them.
I was stoked! 🤗
If you are unfamiliar with the Tamagotchi craze of the 1990s, they were super simple, hand-held video games that looked like little eggs (tamago is egg in Japanese) and would “hatch” baby aliens that would grow up to evolve into different characters. But, in order for them to grow up and die not a tragic death, you had to take care of them. Care for tamagotchis had to happen regularly and included feeding (but not overfeeding it), playing a game, cleaning up poop, administering medicine, and disciplining it when it beeps at you for no reason.
That last one might be my favorite 😈. There’s something wrong with me.
The first tamagotchis came out right at the time when my brother was born, when I was 8-years old. My sister and I had been begging our parents for a dog for years at that point. We were sick of pet fish and wanted something more loving and complex than a rabbit (RIP Layla). I had seen some of my friends and neighbors grow up with dogs, how they would have so much fun teaching them tricks or taking naps on their bellies. I had such a deep, primal desire to have a dog and love it and take care of it forever. I wanted a furry best friend.
Our parents, however, didn’t want to inevitably take care of the dog, no matter how much we tried to plead our case that we really would walk it every morning. So they went the less-stressful route and had another kid.
Makes sense.
My sister and I put together a list of baby names that we thought our parents would like (they did not). Looking back, they were probably better names for a dog, but that’s clearly where our heads were at.
Once our brother was born, he was more or less like a tamagotchi for a while. Simple to take care of (feed, clean, don’t let it die) and kind of boring. I still had a growing urge to take care of something that was flashier and less risky that a real-life squishy baby. Enter: the tamagotchi.
Kids at my school sometimes had 4 or 5 of these little egg keychains on their backpacks, and I remember a teacher yelling at one of my friends for cleaning up his tamagotchi’s poop in the middle of reading time. Tamagotchis are the most needy at the beginning of their life, right after hatching, but eventually become less needy as they grew up. That is, unless you neglected them early in their life. They were they needy and sickly and beeped at you all the time. A true precursor to the notification fatigue that most of us feel nowadays.
I desperately wanted one. It was the same year that I had asked for an RC car for Christmas, the tech gadget boom of the mid-90s being well underway. I think I got one later that year for my birthday, but I can’t remember exactly when it happened. I do remember that I was obsessed. I would check on its hunger and happiness gauges every five minutes even when it wasn’t beeping for attention. I wanted so badly for it to grow into a well-cared for character. But most of the time I couldn’t keep up with it (school being the main reason), and I usually ended up with a sickly adult character that died after a couple days.
I can’t explain the desire to take care of something, dog or tamagotchi, at that age. But it ran deep. I chastised myself for not keeping up with its beeps, and I remember manually resetting it if the teenage character turned out to be one of the bad ones. I needed a redo. I couldn’t fail as an alien parent.
Fast forward a couple decades. Cracking open the egg this time around has been a bit of a jarring experience, if I’m being honest. When the egg hatched, I was right back to being addicted to caring for it. I would check on it every 30 minutes, making sure that it was happy and full, but it always seemed like I was one step behind its needs. It was exciting when it turned from a baby to a teenager into an adult, but I knew from looking at the evolution charts that I had raised a neglected child that would grow up to be a needy adult.
After the final evolution into an adult character, I totally lost interest. I had failed to raise it well in its younger years (1 human day is about the equivalent to 1 tamagotchi year), and now I wasn’t as connected to its further development. I checked in on it just a couple times each day or would let it sit there until it started beeping at me. It died at age 6 — not a very impressive lifespan — and never thanked me for any of the care that I gave it.
The twisted relationship that I had quickly created with this little video game made me think about a similar relationship that I have right now with my dog, Chopper. If you know anything about me, you already know that I have two senior Chihuahuas, Zeb and Chopper. You might not have known that Chopper is a bit of a handful to care for.
He was born a total masterpiece of birth defects. His right front leg is missing and in its place is a chicken wing that ends in one scraggly toenail. He has an extra toe on the front left foot as well as a single toe that ends in two nails. One of his ears isn’t connected to any internal ear canal, and I’m pretty sure he’s super cross-eyed. And he’s not really that smart. All of these things make him completely and utterly lovable.
When we adopted him and Zeb (Zeb is Chopper’s biological father — Zeb was about 10 when we adopted him and Chopper was about 6), they were in bad shape. They had been found wandering the streets of San Antonio, were highly underweight, had rotten teeth, and had a clear mistrust of humans. Well, Zeb did. Chopper was a sweetheart right from the beginning and quickly became my bestest little buddy. Once Zeb got his rotten teeth out and a little bit of training, he followed suit and is now one cuddly buddy.
They thrived in the cushy life we offered them, until we noticed that Chopper was eating and drinking ravenously and had begun to develop a potbelly. He was diagnosed with Cushing’s disease after many tests, and began lifelong treatment to balance out his high cortisol levels. In addition to some other freak accidents due to his awkwardness as a tripod, it seemed like this little guy couldn’t catch a break.
As his Cushing’s disease progressed, he began to decline in health. His skin thinned out on his belly leaving him totally bald, his ears were constantly infected and flaking off, he lost the fur on the tip of his tail, and then one day we noticed that his front leg wasn’t bending properly. We took him to multiple specialists and finally the veterinary teaching hospital at Texas A&M where they pronounced him a true medical phenomenon. He was showing signs of something called psuedomyotonia — a symptom that causes all of his muscles to contract all the time, even when resting. Less than 1% of Cushing’s dogs have this symptom. His muscles began to grow and grow up like a body-builder, and before too long, his legs were completely seized up and useless.
Now, Chopper is still being medicated for his underlying Cushing’s disease. He takes a muscle relaxer to help calm down his bulky muscles. He’s on a low-dose of a pain medication to help with how uncomfortable it must be to be immobile. And he takes a sedative at night to help him sleep. The sedative doesn’t really seem to make any dent.
This dog whines for food all the time. We’ve tried moving around his feeding schedule so that he whines less, but he learns each new schedule and starts crying two hours before each feeding. We’ve trying feeding him more, feeding him less, every combination we can think of. But this little guy’s brain is wired to want food and he lets us know that he wants it. He also cries when he is thirsty or when he has to go to the bathroom, but those are requests that we are happy to oblige even if they do seem frequent and annoying.
Since he can’t walk by himself anymore, we carry him around the house, placing him in little memory-foam beds that we have in every room. He is usually pretty content to sleep next to wherever we are during the day, but even then I can tell it takes a while for him to get comfortable. He worms around on the bed until he finds a nice spot.
It’s become easier for him to eat his meals while sitting in one of his beds. In order for him to drink water or go to the bathroom, we have to prop his little back legs apart so that he can balance just for a moment. He usually falls over before we can scoop him back up, sometimes landing in his own excrement or on a fire ant mound (that really sucked that one time).
He has totally messed up with our sleeping schedule, waking up between 3:30 and 5:30 am every morning either needing water, a potty break, or an early breakfast. My husband and I alternate mornings for who has to take care of him so that neither one of us loses too much sleep two nights in a row. But it’s left us both tired for almost a solid year now since his leg seized up. Chronic exhaustion means that I am quick to anger, and sometimes I find myself yelling at Chopper at the top of my lungs when he starts to whine for dinner while I’m in the middle of working.
Oh, have I mentioned that since we had to pull all of his rotten teeth, his little tongue now sticks out of his mouth and crusts over because it gets too dry?
I feel like a terrible dog mom 99% of the time. A total failure.
I know, logically, that I have given this pup an incredible life. He was considered a senior dog when we adopted him in 2016, and he’s had so many fun adventures and warm beds over the years. He’s now a super senior dog who gets tons of love, good food, and snuggles all the time. Most of the day, he peacefully sleeps somewhere within a ten-foot radius of wherever I am. And I try my best to translate his whines and cries as fast as I can to make sure that he gets what he needs.
But then there are days when I consider stopping giving him his medication to speed up his decline. I panic about his inevitable passing, but find myself wishing for it equally as much. My frustration and exhaustion can easily overpower my sympathy and understanding. He might be in a relatively stable condition right now, but he’s still a very sick little pup, and there’s nothing I can do to make him better.
You know what I realized? He’s kind of like a fucking tamagotchi.
He was raised in terrible conditions, and he didn’t get the proper care that he needed as an adolescent. Now he’s a needy adult that requires constant care.
The heart-breaking thing about this metaphor is that I wasn’t the one to neglect him when he was young. I’m just having to deal with the consequences of a bad upbringing (and bad genetics) in his adult life. And I’m losing interest in taking care of him.
Sometimes I think that I’m not the right person to take care of him anymore. That someone could dedicate more time and love and calmness to him and his illness. Sometimes I think about the fact that he probably wouldn’t be alive right now if he were an 80-dog that couldn’t walk and needed constant care. I worry that his quality of life has diminished past what it should be but I’m unable to see it without bias.
But, then I think about all the times he wakes up and starts to wag his little tail in circles when I go to pet his ears. How much he loves getting pets and sitting on my lap when I’m watching TV at night. How sweet he is when he meets new people and demands love from them. He’s still such a happy, goofy buddy.
And adopting him has been one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life. Even though my husband might disagree, I never regret bringing him home and caring for him as best as I can. When I first got him, he brought me out of a deep loneliness slump that I had been experiencing. He would sit with my in the closet when I had panic attacks. He would like my hand when I would cry.
Taking care of him in his time of need is the least I can do for this dog. It’s hard, it’s not fun, I want to give up all the time, but the amount of love I have for this dog is never-ending.
So what I actually realized is that he’s not really a tamagotchi. What I realized is that I don’t have time to take care of a stupid tamagotchi because I’ve got my hands and my heart full with taking care of a living, breathing pup that loves me back. I found what I was looking for when I was an 8-year-old. I found my furry best friend.
A sad update: Chopper passed away peacefully on April 26, 2022. You can read his obituary here: Chopper Guthrie Obituary.
