Okay, we don't have a Mr. Peabody and our Sherman doesn't have a tail,
but this may interest some folks.  Because most of this is ancient
history in ferret medicine terms I have quite simply forgotten a lot of
details, and i know that there are those who can add on their own info.
Here is a smattering:
 
Sevie: Sevie isn't a surgical candidate but things were carefully weighed
before rejecting that option for a pacemaker.  These days pacemakers are
much smaller than they were when the first pacemaker was put into a
ferret so size wasn't a real factor over-all in the weighing for Sev.
The first pacemaker to save a ferret's life was put in by Dr. Deborah
Kemmerer, in a young and large male according to folks at her office.
In Sevie's case she has a lot of blood pooling and backing-up so the
vasodilator hit with Enacard was tried.  Enacard had been used with
ferrets who have just Level 1 A/V Heart Node Block and for cadiomyopathy
but folks had avoided it with Level 3 in case it might drop blood
pressure too low.  For Sevie it has given her an additional month plus
after her first two months or so with Aminophylline alone.  Dr. Jonathan
of Vetheart was the one to think of trying it experimentally in her case,
and is one of the cardiologists involved.  Her condition is terminal but
without treatment she would have been dead within days of on-set.
 
Hjalmar: Okay, now we are going back in time to a ferret whose onset of
adrenal disease (in his case sadly from lympho) predated adrenal surgery
or at least it's discussion, though others definitely began doing adrenal
surgery during his illness and he finally had surgery.  That was also
back when ferret adrenal disease was thought to be Cushings.  He at first
was on Lysodren which since has been discarded from ferret approaches due
to many problems but was being investigated by Dr. Tom Kawasaki at the
time.  (I think that Hjalmie also had Pred at some point but not sure
of details any longer after so many years.)  Finally Dr. Liz Hillyer
discussed the then-somewhat-new adrenal surgery option with our vet who
was consulting with her on Hjalmar.  On surgery it was found that only
one adrenal was bad (Using ultrasounds for that was also new and
confusion did exist as a result.) The Lysodren had atrophied his other
adrenal and he went into Addison's Crisis.  That was before the medical
approaches for Addisons in ferrets existed, and he was sent home to die
with only hours expected.  On the spur of the moment a non-ferret vet at
the same practise (Dr. Erno Hollo) suggested that as long as he was dying
anyway we may as well try Florinef.  Instead of being dead in hours
Hjalmar was normal within hours.  Around the same time Dr. Bock in CO was
trying Florinef and wound up doing a journal article on it.
 
Helix and Fritter: Both of these individuals were in the same lympho
clump as Hjalmar.  Helix's progressed too rapidly and on the day her
chemo was to have started she instead had to be put down.  Fritter had
chemo.  In her case it was just Pred but it gave her a good chunk of
added quality time and a longer life for about 9 months.  These
treatments were done under the direction of vets at the AMC or in
consultation with them (folks like Dr. Kathy Quesenberry).  Because of
the good results with Fritter Katie Fritz had chemo for Bandit who was 3
years old at the time and was one of the about 10% of ferrets who get
remission from chemo (though newer approaches are being tried all the
time) going on to live to 8 and 1/2 years.  Her Bandit was on the Jeglum
protocol named after Dr. Ann Jeglum who first devised it (and one of
whose admiring nicknames is Dr. Lympho), and other experts like Dr. Kathy
Quesenberry consulted.  These are also old cases as are all in this
letter except Sev's.
 
Meltdown: Meltie had ventricular bigemini with cardiomyopathy, and even
though she was someone for whom Digoxin would not normally have been
tried since her compressions were not compromised, on the advice of Dr.
Bruce Williams it was used when Enacard didn't work for that need.  The
Digoxin worked and that was added to the body of knowledge.  She went on
to live something over a year, maybe a year and a half more with most of
it being excellent time.  The Enacard was found out about while it was
still experimental because our vet had her case discussed at a cardiology
conference when he called someone there and cardiologists found Meltie
interesting.  Enacard was so new then that its research scientists had to
be contacted.  Meltie's success wasn't bad for someone expected to die
any day.
 
Ruffle: Ruffie had Phenobarbital on an experimental basis due to grande
mal seizures from insulinoma at the same time that she had cardiomyopathy
which were expected as a combination to spell out sudden death at any
point.  It didn't control her seizures but it didn't harm her either.
Surgery finally gave her some added good time but it was very risky.
 
I am sure that many folks here have similar stories of how some
procedures or meds first became used in ferrets.  Unlike things that were
actually first tested in ferrets (such as Imrab 3, Purevax CD vax for
ferrets, and Fervac) most of the meds and procedures used in ferrets have
compelling first-case histories.
 
During the lives of the ferrets above the primary treating vets of the
ferrets above (all in New Jersey at time of treatment) were or are: Dr.
Joe Martins in Bellemead who is our current vet, Dr. Hanan Caine (bar
none the best surgeon I've known and now in MA's Richmond area), and Dr.
Chris Newman who was near Princeton then.
 
It is not in the least uncommon for folks who didn't have ferrets 20, 15,
or even 10 years ago for so many procedures and meds to simply be unaware
that such a huge percentage of ferret medical and surgical procedures
arose from simply carrying something over and trying it, so the idea that
testing led to such approaches is a typical fallacy which is just a
natural assumption of not having seen what actually happened.  There's
no fault in that and it is a very natural assumption to make under such
conditions, but it's wrong.
[Posted in FML issue 3936]