Spooky my number one PR jill is sick.  Saturday morning she was a very flat
ferret, far away look in her eyes more or less out of it.  I rushed her to
the vet, a 5 minute walk for me.
 
Fortunately the vet that was on duty was one of the ferret friendly ones.
Anyway Nicky gave Spooky a check over, Spooky seemed to be in pain when
Nicky was feeling her abdomen, and decided to keep her in from observation
and treatment.
 
Spooky's treatment so far consists of keeping her on a heat pad (her
temperature is 99.9 a bit on the low side), regular subQ fluids, she was
dehydrated on Saturday morning.  A couple of the vet nurses are also
feeding Spooky with liquidised Ferret Complete - I took in a bag of
Spooky's usual Ferrets Choice... feeding her a different complete food
won't help the diarrhoea.
 
Symptoms, discharge from eyes and nose, dark stools - possibly passing
blood, breathing a bit laboured, loss of appetite, not drinking, lethargy,
general weakness in limbs.  In other words she's a very sick ferret.  Had a
fairly long chat with a South African vet (the first vet was from Oz), he
was very keen to get to the bottom of Spooky's problem.  Made various
suggestions as to what it might be but was going to phone a lab to see just
what tests they could do.  He wants to take scrapings from her eye and nose
discharge (CDV test), stool sample for parvo and VHD, and blood ADV.  I
think he's just about got all bases covered.  Spooky is a rather large
jill, the vet commented that she looked as if she'd just gone down with the
illness today and not several days ago, he said that they lose weight very
rapidly when sick so Spooky being overweight might just help to pull her
through.
 
BTW Spooky has been vaccinated against CDV and all the other six ferrets
that are in her group aren't showing any signs of illness, they were all
rocketing around the living room this morning... I think the fact that all
the others are fine is confusing the vet even more...
 
I do have two un-vaccinated jills - they haven't been in close contact with
Spooky but they have been using the same exercise area.
 
If it is CDV the vet mentioned that euthanasia would be kindest - he was
surprised when I said that I knew of two ferrets that had recovered from
CDV.  One had the shakes but lived her life to the full, and the other one
had weakness on one hind leg.
 
--
Sheila
Bolton Ferret Welfare.
Author of "All about your Ferret" - Ringpress  ISBN 1-86054-171-2 (UK)
Barron's  ISBN 0-7641-1189-2 (USA & Canada)
NFWS. Web Site: http://www.n-f-w-s.co.uk last update 27 September 2000
Web Site: www.sheila.btinternet.co.uk/bolton.htm  last update 27 September
2000
Waiting at Rainbow Bridge: Jill, Deanna Troy, Cameron, Carnath, Button,
Bill, Bobby, Jasper, Inga, Holly, Fergle,  Amanda, Sparky, Daniel, Blackie,
Marvin & Claude
[Posted in FML issue 3193]