A few possible causes of bleeding can be urinary tract infections (which can happen in bucks as well as does), infection of the uterus, or tumour of the uterus. In rarer cases the blood can be due to bladder stones (as happened to Phoebe) or crystals. The real cause and proper treatment can only really be ascertained by your vet and he/she should be consulted as soon as possible for reasons I'll now give.

This is an experience which happened to my second ever girl, Millie.

One day when I was still new to rats, I decided to give the girls a bath, it was a warm day and they’d never had one before, so I took them all upstairs and ran an inch or so of water in the bath for them to paddle in and get used to.

After a while (and much squeaking and rat raisins in the bath) I took them out and plonked them on a towel to dry them off. That’s when I saw the blood.

At first I thought it could be porphyryn from the stress of the bath, I checked everyone’s eyes and nose but nobody was secreting any, so I checked everyone else all over, and found that Millie was bleeding from her vagina.

Not very much, only a drop around the vulva, but enough to alarm me.

I phoned my vet’s surgery (same surgery as that which later misdiagnosed Mr Jingles, but different vet), and told them about it, but by then the blood had stopped, so I made an appointment for the following day which was Tuesday.

I took her in, but she still wasn’t bleeding. The vet said that it was possible it was from a urinary infection (even though I knew the blood was coming from the vulva and not the urethra), and told me to watch her fluid intake over the next day and bring her back on the Thursday, and if she’d been drinking loads, then their diagnosis was probably right and they’d give her antibiotics, if not, they’d suspect a Pyometra/Hematometra and spay her as a precaution.

Pyometra means a uterus filled with pus from infection, hematometra means a uterus filled with blood.

I took her home and put her into the hospital cage and lined it with sheets of white paper so that I could watch her closely and any blood would be noticable, I also gave her a measured amount of water in her bottle so that I could see how much she’d drank overnight.

I went to bed and thought everything was fine.

I had a late night and didn’t wake up until about 11 or 12 the next day, I went downstairs to find Millie’s hospital cage awash with blood, and she was lying in a pool of it, barely moving.

I freaked out and phoned the vet, who told me to bring her straight up, but I don’t drive, everyone was out at work.

I phoned my Dad who told me where to find some money for a cab, I rang for a cab, but over half an hour passed and it still hadn’t arrived. I was on the verge of throwing a towel over the cage, and sprinting to the vet’s surgery, all the time Millie was getting weaker and weaker.

Finally the cab arrived, and when we got to the surgery, they took her in straight away, and gave me the option to operate or to let her go I chose the surgery. Millie was taken in for an emergency spay.

After a while, then vet came back out and showed me what had happened. She brought the uterus with her to show me, and what had happened is that it had somehow become inflamed, probably due to infection, and one horn of the uterus (Rats uteri are shaped like a Y) had become so inflamed that it had ruptured, and Millie had haemorrhaged overnight.

The vet estimated that she’d lost about one third of her blood supply (I’d taken the blood soaked paper and bedding to show the vet) so it’s amazing that she survived, but little by little (and with many portions of grilled pig’s liver to boost her iron) she came back up and lived over another year.

Since then, I’ve had 3 more rats with Pyometra/Hematometra, two of whom were spayed, and one was successfully treated with antibiotics (amoxycillin).

It's important to act quickly if there's any sign of blood coming from the genital area of a rat and after treatment has been sought, keep a very close eye on their recovery.