Lesson 6: Fur, Skin and Eyes: What Changes on the Outside

Of the eight common signs of age that I copied into the front of our notebook, three can be seen from across the room without touching Clem at all. Thinner or uneven fur. Slower grooming. Cloudy eyes. More than a third of what an older hamster's body has to say, it says on the outside, in plain sight.

I found that both comforting and a little humbling. Comforting, because it meant that a family could learn a great deal simply by looking, without picking her up or disturbing her sleep. Humbling, because I had been looking at Clem every day for well over a year and had seen almost none of it until Mira pointed it out with the end of her pencil.

So I set myself a small task for the rest of that winter. I would learn the outside of her the way a gardener learns a hedge: its thick parts and thin parts, its colours in different light, the places where it always looks a little ragged and the places where a new gap would mean something. This lesson is what I found.

First: Why is her fur getting thinner?

Thinner or uneven fur is one of the common signs of age in a hamster, and for Clem it was one of the first. It began, as far as the notebook can tell, on her hips and the lower part of her back. The golden fur there, which used to be as thick and even as a new doormat, began to look a little sparse, so that in a certain light the paler skin showed faintly through.

It did not happen all at once. Mira's sketches show it best. In a drawing from the summer before, Clem's back is shaded in short, dense strokes. In one from midwinter, the strokes over her hips are fewer and further apart, as if the pencil had grown tired at that point. Mira did not set out to record the change. She just drew what she saw, every week, and the change appeared on the page.

I can only say what I learned in general and what Dr. Hale told us about Clem in particular. In older hamsters, fur often thins and can become uneven, and slower grooming may add to the rough look, because an older body finds it harder to twist round and reach. Clem's thinning was slow, it was on both sides though more on one, and it came with no other change in her skin. Dr. Hale looked at it and said it fitted an older hamster and was worth watching.

What I watch for, beyond that, are the things that would make it different. Fur that comes away in patches over a few days rather than thinning over months. Bald spots with sore-looking skin underneath. Thinning together with a lot of scratching. Any new lump under the fur. Those are things to show the vet, and I do not try to decide on my own what they mean.

There is a quiet sadness in watching a coat thin. I felt it. It is the same feeling as noticing the grey at your own temples in a shop window you did not expect to pass. But I have come to think of Clem's thinner fur as something like the worn elbows of a favourite jumper. It shows how long it has been loved. It does not make it any less warm to hold.

The practical side is warmth. A hamster with thinner fur may feel a cool room more than she used to, the way I now need a scarf on evenings when June goes out in shirtsleeves. That was one more reason to keep Clem's corner steady, roughly 20 to 24 °C (68 to 75 °F), away from draughts, direct sun and heaters close to the cage. A chilly room can make a hamster go cold and still, and that is a reason to warm the room gently and call the vet.

I also learned that I could not judge her coat fairly in every light. In the afternoon, when a little daylight reached her corner from across the room, the thin patches showed clearly. In the evening lamplight, the same fur looked warm and nearly whole. For a few days I thought it was changing from hour to hour. It was not. It was the light. After that, I only judged her coat by the lamp on the kitchen table, at weighing time, so that each week was compared with the last on equal terms.

Second: What can her skin tell us?

Usually, very little, because it is hidden. That is the honest answer. A hamster's skin sits under her fur, and on a healthy young animal you hardly see it at all. It is only where the fur thins, on the hips or the belly or around the ears, that it shows. In Clem's late life, it began to show more, and so I began to look.

What I saw, mostly, was ordinary. Pale, smooth skin under the thinner patches, the colour of the inside of a shell. Nothing raised, nothing red, nothing flaking. I wrote that down, too, because a note that says "skin looks normal" is just as useful as one that says something is wrong. It gives the next note something to be compared with.

The signs I would show the vet are any patch that looks red or sore, flaky or scabbed, any place she keeps scratching or nibbling at, and above all any new lump. Lumps are easier to feel than to see, but I do not go feeling for them by handling her every evening. I watch for odd shapes under the fur when she stretches or washes, and I mention anything I am unsure of at the next visit, or sooner if it is new.

I learned that her ears are a good place to look, because there is less fur there and the skin is easy to see. Clem's ears are thin and nearly transparent, and when the lamp is behind them they glow faintly pink, like a pair of rose petals. In her late life they have stayed clean and smooth. If they ever looked crusty, sore or very different from one side to the other, I would show the vet.

There is one area that needs a special word, and it is under her tail. A wet or dirty bottom is one of the signs that goes straight to the vet in a hamster of any age. I check it with a glance whenever she sits up to wash or turns away from me at the bowl. It takes a second. I have never had to act on it, and I hope I never do. But it is part of my evening look, the way checking the back door is part of locking up.

Otto asked me once why I was "looking at Clem's bottom all the time". I told him it was a job like checking the tyres on a bicycle. You do not do it because you expect something to be wrong. You do it because if something were wrong, you would want to know before the next ride. He thought about that and added "Clem's bottom" to the list of jobs he wanted, which I declined on her behalf.

Third: Why do her eyes look cloudy?

One evening in midwinter, in the low lamplight, Clem turned her head towards me and I saw it for the first time. Her right eye, which had always been as dark and shiny as a drop of ink, had a faint milky look, like a window on a cold morning before the sun reaches it. I looked at her left eye. It was clear. I looked back at the right. The haze was still there.

Cloudy eyes are one of the common signs of age in a hamster. I knew that from my reading. Even so, seeing it made my heart drop. Eyes are where we look for a person, and it felt as if a little of Clem had gone behind glass. I sat for a long while that evening without turning the page of my book.

The next morning I did what the notebook had taught me to do. I wrote down the date, which eye, what it looked like and in what light, and I asked Mira to draw it. I rang the clinic and described it. The receptionist asked a few questions and booked us in, since it was a new change and Dr. Hale would want to see it.

Dr. Hale looked at both eyes with a small light, and at Clem's face and fur and the way she moved. She did not give us a name for anything. She said that a cloudy look can come with age, that Clem's eye did not look sore, and that she was moving and finding her way well. She asked us to bring her back promptly if the eye looked red, wet, sticky or closed, if it changed quickly, or if Clem seemed to bump into things or lose her way.

On the drive home I kept glancing at the travel box on my lap, as if I might see through the scarf to her eye. June told me, gently, to stop. "She is the same hamster she was this morning," she said. It was true. The only thing that had changed was what I knew. Clem herself had walked into her box, sniffed Dr. Hale's hand, and gone to sleep on the way home, exactly as she always did.

What made the biggest difference to how I felt was something I already knew but had not put together. Hamsters see poorly even when they are young. They live by smell, hearing and whiskers. Clem's world was never mainly a world of sight. A cloudy eye, for her, is not the same loss it would be for me. It is more like a dimmer switch turned down a little in a room she mostly finds by touch and scent.

That changed what we did. We kept her cage arranged exactly as it always had been, so that every path she knew by smell and memory stayed where it was. We did not move the bowl or the water bottle or the entrance to her house. When Ravi later lowered her floors, he did it in a way that kept the layout as familiar as he could. A familiar room, for a hamster, is a map she carries in her nose.

I still check her eyes most evenings. Clear or cloudy, both the same, or one different from the other, any wetness, any redness, any squinting. The right eye has stayed hazy, much as it was. The left has stayed clear. Some evenings I think the haze is a little thicker, some evenings a little thinner, and I have learned that this is often the lamp and not the eye. That is why I always look in the same light.

Fourth: What are her whiskers for, and do they change?

Her whiskers are, in a real sense, her eyes. When Clem walks, they sweep ahead of her and to the sides, brushing the walls and the floor and the edges of things, telling her where she is. Watching her move through her cage in the dark is like watching someone walk through their own house at night with their fingertips trailing along the wall.

I had never paid any attention to them before. Now I find them fascinating. When she pauses in a doorway, her whiskers fan out and quiver for a moment, as if reading the room. When she comes to the edge of a shelf, they tip down. When she meets my hand, they touch it first, very lightly, before her nose follows. It is a delicate little ceremony, and I am charmed by it every time.

Do whiskers change with age? I could not find a clear answer that I trusted, so I will not give one. What I can say is that Clem's whiskers still sweep and quiver as they always have, and that a few are a little shorter or bent at the tips, which may be nothing more than an old hamster's whiskers after a long life of brushing against things.

What I watch, then, is how she uses them rather than how they look. Does she still sweep ahead of her when she walks? Does she slow at edges and doorways? Does she seem to find her way as easily as before? If she started to bump into things, or seemed lost in a cage she knows well, I would show the vet. That would be a change in how she meets her world, and those changes matter.

Otto, after hearing me describe all this, tried walking down the hallway with his eyes shut and the fingertips of one hand trailing along the wallpaper. He made it all the way to the bottom stair without stepping on a single pebble or toy animal from his long line, and he was very proud. "That's how Clem does it," he said. I did not tell him that she probably does it far better. He had understood the important part.

Mira did a whole page of whisker studies one rainy Sunday. She drew Clem's face from the front, with each whisker as a fine line spreading out like the spokes of an old bicycle wheel. Then, in the corner, she drew a tiny note to herself. "Don't move her things. She knows them by feel." I thought that was the wisest sentence in the notebook, and I told her so.

Fifth: Should an older hamster smell different?

A clean, healthy hamster smells of very little, or of something faintly warm and dusty, like a linen cupboard. Clem has always smelled like that. Her nest, when it is fresh, smells of paper and of her. Her corner of the living room, on the low wooden chest by the bookshelf, does not smell of anything at all unless you put your nose quite close.

Smell is her own first sense, and I came to think it was worth being one of mine too, at least for the space of a moment each day. When I fill her water bottle in the morning, I notice whether the cage smells the same as yesterday. Mostly it does. If I ever noticed a new, strong or unusual smell from her or her nest that did not clear when the dirty corner was cleaned, I would mention it to the vet.

I keep a little rule about this, and it is less about her than about me. I try not to cover smells. A cage that smells fresh because it has been sprayed with something tells me nothing. A cage that smells fresh because it is clean tells me she is well. Strong scents can also unsettle a hamster who lives by smell, so we keep perfumes, sprays and new cleaning things well away from her corner.

Keeping her smell honest also means keeping her cage clean in a calm way. We take out the soiled corner where she always does her business and leave her nest alone as much as we can, because her nest smells of her, and a nest that smells of her is a safe nest. A sudden full clean that wipes away every familiar scent can leave an older hamster unsettled, like coming home to find that someone has rearranged all your furniture.

Otto took up this idea with great energy for a week, sniffing the air by the cage every morning like a small detective. "Clem smells like Clem," he would report, with some satisfaction. I wrote it in the notebook exactly as he said it. It was, after all, true, and it was the kind of report that makes the next one easier to judge.

Sixth: How do we check her gently?

This is the question that ties the others together. Every sign in this lesson can be seen, but some need a closer look than a glance across the room, and an older hamster who dislikes being handled should not be held and turned and examined every evening just so that her family can feel sure. The check has to be gentle enough that it does not become a stress of its own.

We settled on a rhythm. Every evening, a look from my chair at dusk: coat, eyes, how she moves, how she washes, any sign of a wet or dirty bottom. Once a week, at weighing time, a slightly closer look as she sits in June's little weighing bowl on the kitchen scale, under a soft light, for no more than a minute. And whenever something new appeared, a note in the book and, if it was one of the signs, a call to the clinic.

We also do the evening look in the same order every time, which sounds fussy but saves a great deal of forgetting. Coat first, from the top of her head to her tail. Then her eyes, both of them. Then her ears. Then how she moves when she walks away. Then a glance under her tail. It is like the order in which I check the house before bed, windows then doors then the cooker, so that I never lie awake wondering whether I did one of them.

The weekly look is where most of the closer checking happens, and it works because Clem is already used to the bowl. She climbs in from my cupped hands, sits for her weight to settle, sniffs about, and then usually begins to wash. That washing is the gift. As she twists and stretches, I can see her hips, her belly, her ears and the fur under her chin. I do not touch. I look, and I say what I see aloud, and Mira writes it down.

We keep the light the same each time, the lamp on the kitchen table rather than the bright ceiling light, because fur, skin and eyes all look different in different light. A cloudy eye can look clear under a strong bulb and hazier under a weak one. Thin fur can look thicker from one angle than another. A steady light is like a steady scale. It makes the numbers mean something.

And we stop before she wants us to. That is perhaps the most important part. If she begins to fidget, to look for a way out, or to press herself into a corner of the bowl, we finish. She goes back to her cage, near her nest, with a seed from my fingers. The check is over. Anything we did not see can wait until next week, unless it was something to show the vet, in which case it does not wait at all.

I think about my own visits to the doctor as I have grown older. The ones I dreaded were the ones that came after months of not looking, when every small thing had piled up into something big and frightening. The ones I did not mind were the regular, ordinary ones, where nothing much happened. I would like Clem's checks to be like that: ordinary, short, and almost boring.

Questions Around the Table

It was the evening after the eye visit, and everyone wanted to know what Dr. Hale had said. Otto asked first, as always. "Is Clem going blind?" I said that her eye looked cloudy, which can come with age, and that Dr. Hale had not said anything about blindness. I reminded him that Clem mostly finds her way by smell and whiskers, and that she had walked straight to her bowl that evening without any trouble.

Mira asked, "Should I stop drawing her fur so thin? It looks sad." I said no. Her drawings were true, and true drawings are worth more to us than kind ones. Then I said that a thin coat is not a sad thing in itself, any more than a grandfather's thin hair is, and she laughed, which I had been hoping for.

Ravi asked, "Is her corner warm enough now that her fur is thinner?" I said it was a good question, and that we should check the room more carefully while the evenings stayed cold. Roughly 20 to 24 °C (68 to 75 °F), no draughts, no direct sun, nothing hot right beside the cage. If we ever found her cold and still, we would warm the room gently and call the vet.

June asked, "Should we brush her, to help with the rough fur?" I said that Dr. Hale had told us a clean, dry nest and a comfortable room would help more than brushing at home, and that handling an older hamster too much can upset her. If the fur ever looked wet, matted or dirty, especially at the back, it would be time to show the vet, not to reach for a brush.

Otto had the last word, very quietly, as he slid off his chair. "Does Clem know she looks different?" I said I did not think so. She has no mirror. She knows herself by smell and by the feel of her own fur under her paws when she washes. To herself, I think, she is simply Clem, and that seemed to satisfy him.

Points to Watch

Watch her fur for slow thinning on the hips and back, which can come with age, and show the vet if it comes away in patches over a few days, if the skin beneath looks sore, or if she keeps scratching at one place.

Watch the skin where her fur is thin, and her ears, for anything red, flaky, crusted or raised, and treat any new lump as something to show the vet promptly, whatever her age.

Check under her tail with a glance whenever she sits up to wash or turns away, because a wet or dirty bottom is a sign to take straight to the vet and never to wait on.

Watch her eyes in the same soft light each time, and write down which eye looks cloudy and how, since a slow haze can come with age but an eye that looks red, wet, sticky or closed, or a change that comes quickly, should be shown to the vet. If you are concerned, see a vet.

Watch how she uses her whiskers and finds her way, and keep her cage arranged as it has always been, because a hamster who sees poorly lives by smell, hearing and whiskers, and bumping into things or seeming lost is a change to show the vet.

Keep the room steady, roughly 20 to 24 °C (68 to 75 °F), and the checks short, gentle and regular, so that a thinner coat does not leave her cold and the looking itself never becomes the thing that upsets her.