‘You can hear the fresh trauma’: Home care aid makes horrifying mistake when she cooks her client a yummy meal of roasted rats

A story about roasted rats told in two videos has gone viral on TikTok — but be warned, it might make you feel sick. They were posted by a woman named Lindsay (username @ladymixerlot), and they tell a genuinely nauseating tale.

In the first video, which is three minutes and 32 seconds long and starts with on-screen text saying “Disgusting story time,” Lindsay explains how she has two disabled roommates, one of whom qualifies for home help aides. The roommate in question had asked her aide to roast some squash in the oven. However, for reasons known only to the home help person, they instead took a bag of frozen rats meant for the roommate’s pet snake, put them in a baking dish, and cooked them instead.

Lindsay described the disgusting subsequent smell and the measures taken to alleviate it and mocked the United States education system for producing people foolish enough to mix up squash and frozen rats.

In the second, longer video, which is five minutes and 48 seconds, the young woman whose aide made the unfathomable error explains the situation in further detail. She described heading into the kitchen to investigate what smelled like a “wet dog barbecue,” then checking the fridge to see what was cooking (because it definitely wasn’t squash), and failing to register the thawing rats were missing because the possibility of them being in the oven didn’t cross her mind. Upon checking in the oven and seeing three large rats — still with their fur on — roasting away in a dish, she understandably had a meltdown. Some of her roommate’s one-liners are brilliant; you should watch the video fully to hear them.

Both videos garnered a lively response from users with mixed emotions (mainly ranging from amused and confused to disgusted).

How did TikTok react?

Responses to the first video included observations like, “Clearly this person did not know what squash is,” and “Imagine if your roommate was blind, or had a developmental disability and they didn’t know what they were eating! That’s so scary to think about!”

However, people primarily had questions, many of which were answered in the second video. The questions included, “did they explain how they got so confused? cuz I’m worried,” “Was she like nervous to ask for help? Did she realize it was rats? Like howwww,” “Is the aide incompetent or malicious?? How does that happen??” and “Soo many questions!!! Were they seasoned? Were they plated afterwards? Was silverware involved? A garnish perhaps?”

Nearly all of the comments to the second video were about the roommate telling the story. Some acknowledged her shock, while others admired her storytelling skills.

Comments included, “The delivery of this story was impeccable,” “Someday, the theater kids will use this as an audition monologue,” “she just experienced the seven stages of grief in front of us,” and “The pain and disbelief is still so fresh and vivid. you can hear the fresh trauma.”

Others wrote things like, “Stumbling across this video with zero context is literally the best thing in the world, it just gets wilder every single sentence,” “i get how this is funny, but that person genuinely scares me. i would not trust them again ever for any reason,” and “That smell is one of the nastiest smells ever (accidentally had the water too hot once for the snake food).”

According to Born Free USA, around 3% of American households won 7.3 million pet reptiles, many of which eat rats (snakes are by far the most common of those reptiles). Even with that many in the country, we doubt any reptile owners have ever previously cooked their pet’s frozen rats, having inexplicably mistaken them for vegetables.