When I was in the seventh grade, my sixth grade teacher caught some kids in the classroom messing with a lizard. I don't know if it was wild or captive, but it seemed to not mind being held, despite what they had done to it. They had cut his tail off, and he Q-tipped the end of it, wrapping the end with some gauze. (A mistake on his part, as it took forever to get it unstuck.) At the end of the day, I gave him a hug good-bye as I always did. He stopped me right in the middle of my stride, and told me to come into the classroom for a minute. I followed him in, and he gave me a Vitamin Water bottle that he had taped back together after cutting the top four centimeters off. At first I didn't see the lizard, but then he got spooked and started to move around frantically. He told me: "You take him, help him heal and get better. When he has healed, let him go somewhere aways from people." A few days later, my teacher got into an auto accident, and I never saw him again. Almost a year later, I caught a juvenile Desert Banded Gecko. I had just filled the tank with plenty of bugs, and week later I had put some more in the tank, a lot of very small ones for the Gecko, and some larger ones for the larger one which I named Fred. Out of all the bugs in that tank, the gecko decides to eat cricket two times lager than itself back legs first. Well, the cricket kicked while still being swallowed, and it kicked through the poor little guys side. My friend, who I told could have the gecko was crushed when she went in to get him. I felt a little guilty. Fred stopped eating after that, and I let him go, but the next morning he hadn't left. He just didn't feel like moving at all. I took him back in, and put him back in his tank, trying what I could to get him to eat. He got weaker and weaker, and one day i coaxed him towards a cricket, and he started eating again! But, a week later, he stopped again, and I was left trying to swallow my heart and put it back in my chest, as I knew what was going to happen. A couple weeks of replacing crickets that died in the tank because he wasn't eating them at all, I turned over his favorite climbing post. It had large leaves that he used to sit on, and a wooden hollow base he sat in when he didn't feel like being held. Here is the picture I have with me right now.
Sorry it's so blurry, the camera I had back then wasn't in good shape. It was pretty old. But in the background, you can see the climbing post I mentioned above, his water dish, sand, sticks that were supposed to be resting in the corners of the tank, and you can sort of see the stub of a tail he had.
