‘Cake Bandit’ opossum hospitalized after indulging in an entire Costco cake

The "Cake Bandit" is being treated at Nebraska Wildlife Rehab. (Courtesy Nebraska Wildlife Rehab via CNN Newsource)

A real estate agent in Omaha, Nebraska, recently got an unexpected houseguest – a hungry opossum who ate the entire tuxedo chocolate mousse cake she recently bought from Costco.

Kim Doggett walked outside last Sunday to find her chocolate cake on the floor of her back porch, brown paw prints on her new beige couch and a panting opossum lying on top of it.

Now fans have flooded Nebraska Wildlife Rehab, where the opossum was admitted on February 10, with messages of support for the viral “Cake Bandit” who ate an entire Costco cake.

“We’ve all been there, girl,” one person said under the wildlife rescue service’s Facebook post.

“I have also begun to (breathe) heavily after eating an entire cake by myself. Maybe not Costco but it definitely has happened more than once. I get it gurl. I get it,” another commenter said.

Earlier that night, Doggett asked her son to take her homemade peanut butter balls outside to the deck, as their refrigerator was full.

“We just (ran) out of room,” Doggett said. “And in the wintertime, it works out great, because you don’t have to try to slam everything in there. You can set it out on the back deck.”

Upon opening the door, her son quickly shut it and refused to go back out.

“There’s a possum on your couch,” Hayden Doggett, 22, said to her.

His mom didn’t believe him at first.

“I really thought he was messing with me, so I went over and I turned the light on, I opened the door, and I was like, ‘Oh my,’” Kim Doggett said. “And then I was like, ‘Oh, it ate the Costco cake.’ The whole thing almost was sitting on the ground next to the couch.”

The two tried to shoo the opossum away, but with no luck, she began to consider whether the chocolate could have been poisonous to the animal. Kim Doggett then called the American Humane Society, which retrieved and transported the animal to be evaluated.

Eating the entire cake likely saved the opossum’s life, Nebraska Wildlife Rehab said. The “Cake Bandit” is currently being treated for both her recent dietary habits and unrelated lead toxicity.

“It appears that she was lucky to have been caught red-handed, because it allowed her to come to our hospital and get diagnosed with what can become a fatal condition in wildlife,” Laura Stastny, the group’s executive director, said in an email to CNN.

Since her admittance, the organization has designed T-shirts with “Cake Bandit” on the front, and the back displaying the animal’s rehab admission note: “Opossum was brought in due to having eaten an entire Costco chocolate cake. He was panting a lot, however mobile and alert.”

“We thought we’d celebrate the sweetest scandal of the week with a custom-designed Opossum Cake Bandit t-shirt that also supports our mission to save native wildlife and contribute to more success stories like hers,” Nebraska Wildlife Rehab said in a Facebook post.

The opossum is expected to make a full recovery and will be returned to her natural habitat in a few weeks, Stastny said.

“We are optimistic about her future release, but it will likely be toward the end of March or the beginning of April before she is released into the wild,” she added.

By Dawn Sawyer, CNN