In early 2008, I had an aquarium that had recently experienced the tragedy of all of its residents dying. I don't recall the details — I must have made some stupid mistake — but I was disappointed and frustrated. I decided to go out to the pet store and get a couple "stupid goldfish" to occupy the tank with that I would deliberately resist naming, since they would "probably just die anyway". (I was experiencing a fair amount of cynicism after my failure). What ended up actually happening was that my respect for goldfish increased tenfold, and those two fish lived for the next 3 years.
Hubert Cumberdale was a Ryukin goldfish. He started out small but grew to be nearly the size of my hand.
Here he is with his friend Mr Untitled (the fish half out of the picture).
Here he is a year older. His characteristic hump grew more pronounced, and the brown on him spread a bit further.
I miss Mr Untitled a lot too; as you can see he was pretty silly.
He had been sick many times in his life, contracting ick (ichthyophthirius multifiliis) several times, but he always recovered. Now, at some point after I'd had him for at least a year, a brown mark showed up on his left side. It came and went; I figured he changed his style from time to time. =p
Though blurry, you can tell that he had quite a lot of brown at this point in his life.
But this brown spot on his side eventually turned into a growth, that eventually became a tumour, that eventually grew to be nearly as big has Hubert himself.
Luckily, it was benign. He had it for years and he was still healthy. But eventually, the weight of it became too much for him to handle, and his ability to swim began to decline. He already had some difficulty with how fat he was, and the tumour just made it worse. Eventually it didn't even matter how much the tumour had come to weigh — its mere presence interfered with his balance, and he started flipping over.
The poor thing remained this way for quite some time, wavering between floating on the top and sunk on the bottom. It got to the point where he could no longer swim to the top to get food, and the tumour had a number of new growths on it. It became necessary that I hand-feed him, and I knew that the tumour needed to be removed somehow. Surely fish aren't happy if they can't swim. That's like a bird who can't fly.
My dad suggested using an ultrasonic spot remover, a machine used by aestheticians to remove skin blemishes. Given the fact that both of my parents are hairdressers and aestheticians, there was one handy. I put it off for weeks, though, because I was nervous. I called a veterinary doctor from New York who had successfully operated on a goldfish and left a message with some questions, but he never called me back. It finally came time that we needed to do something, so on a saturday night we brought one of the machines home and set it up. I was getting really, really nervous; I knew that without anaesthesia, Hubert wouldn't survive the stress of the operation. After some time of thinking, debating with myself whether or not to put it off until sunday and basically attempting to cope with the imminent death of my beloved fish, I decided we might as well get it over with.
Me, my dad, my mum, and my boyfriend all went to my room with a couple towels. My dad was going to make the incision while I held the fish in a towel in my hand. He readied the machine. The spot remover tool had a needle tip that was supposed to cauterise the wound at the same time it cuts. I gently picked up Hubert from the water and placed him in the towel, dabbing some of the moisture off of him. The tumour completely lost its shape once it left the water. It became this pulpy mound of flesh that just slopped over on top of him, which was going to make things considerably more difficult. My dad began to cut away at the tumour, and it started to fall apart. We were all REALLY tense. We put him back in the water for a few moments so he could take a breath.
The tumour at this point was tattered and ugly. I picked him up again and placed him on the towel, and my dad continued working at the tumour. When it began to bleed I started crying. Some of the guts slopped onto the floor and I really lost it. We quickly got as much of the tumour off as we could and put him back into the water, and he sunk down. He was breathing heavily and a faint cloud of blood was dissipating from the torn-up tumour. This was an extremely difficult thing to watch. My dad told me to wash and disinfect my hands, so I went into the bathroom, still crying, and my boyfriend came in after me and hugged me, also crying. I'm pretty sure my mum cried a little bit as well, and you could hear the thumb-snapping of my dad's nervous ticks starting up. This was really difficult for my family. I don't think any of us realised how big of a deal this fish was until now.
This was all right before dinner. My boyfriend and I lost our appetites completely and sort of just wandered around the house looking traumatised.
A bit later, the blood finally clotted. And believe it or not, he did survive the surgery. He was still alive in the morning. That sunday I called all around town to see if there were any aquatic vets, but it turns out there aren't any at all in my city. The problem was, even though he survived the surgery, he still couldn't swim any better than before. All we really managed to do was take a bit of weight off, which, helpful as it was, didn't improve internal problems. My best guess was that the tumour was suppressing his swim bladders in such a way that he couldn't hold himself upright. (This was confirmed later during the autopsy. One swim bladder was considerably larger than the other, and neither were large enough to support his weight anyway).
He was stuck on his side on the bottom of the aquarium all weekend.
On monday night, I saw that he wasn't doing very well. At times he had stopped breathing. So I decided to build him some kind of makeshift fish hammock that would hold him upright and keep his side from scraping on the rocks any longer.
This is what came of that:
It was pretty successful. He wiggled out of it a couple times, but I finally got him secured in a way that was hopefully as comfortable as I could make it. I sprinkled some fish flakes into the aquarium and moved Hubert over towards them so he could experience eating like a normal fish again. His appetite was decreased, but he did eat a little.
The next morning (today), I saw that he had stopped breathing. He was officially gone.
I was really sad to discover this, but very grateful that he'd gone out relatively comfortably rather than during the traumatic surgery.
Today was pretty gloomy... especially because I was dreading the funeral that I had to conduct tonight.
Flushing him down the toilet isn't really an option. He's much too big, and he's much too special for that kind of funeral.
I was planning on mummifying him.
So that's what I did tonight. I had to gently remove his organs, rinse him off, and pack him in salt and baking soda. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It's a lot different when the animal isn't alive anymore. Live operations, on the other hand, are heartbreaking.
Now, he's officially buried. I'll miss him a lot... he was an incredible, miraculous fish. This whole experience was very profound for me and my family. It was also a lesson in priorities and the importance of even the smallest of God's creatures.
Thanks for reading, and remember that goldfish are amazing animals. RIP Hubert Cumberdale.
Two years later, he moved with me out to Michigan and lived there for one and a half years and then, when I finally moved back to Minnesota, he joined me there, where he lived for almost another two years in a 20-gallon tank he had all to himself (he was pretty big). 
