I was sleeping.  I haven't been taking such good care of myself, lately.
I am a diabetic, and my sugar has been up.  Well, who am I kidding?  It's
always up.  I haven't taken much control over it.  I take my meds and I
make my excuses, and as I long as I feel halfway decent it's a good day.
Not this evening, however.  I ate a big breakfast for dinner and took my
meds late.  Hey, it's my day off.  These are the bits of stupidity I will
be relaying to my dialysis technician, eventually.  But no matter.  I was
in a deep, high-sugar slumber, waiting for my meds to kick in.  Usually I
wake up feeling better, but not tonight.
 
I am awakened by my wife calling my name.  She is crying and holding one
of our guys.  My mind is fuzzy and still asleep, and I'm trying to put
everything together.  I don't know if she tells me or if I see him, but I
realize that she's holding Dusty.  She tells me that Dusty had come up to
her and was having some problems breathing.  She picked him up, trying to
soothe him, and then he unexpectedly took his last breath.  He was just
gone.
 
She tells me this, still in shock, as she holds Dusty in her arms, an
exaggerated frown covering her face as she tries not to cry out loud.
She tells me that he's still warm and she hands him to me, a gift of
sorts that both she and I understand.  I hold him in my arms next to my
chest.  It would be easy to imagine that he was still alive.  He is still
warm and soft.  But this is not the phony "sleeping dead ferret" act, and
I will not shake him awake and chastise him for scaring the bejesus out
of me.  He will not look at me through blurred eyes and yawn, wondering
what the fuss is all about.  It will be just me who is left to wonder.  I
look into his face and still see his comical buck-toothed fangs, but they
are mismatched with his lifeless eyes.  It is real and not real.  My mind
is having trouble processing things.
 
This is our second adrenal ferret to pass in the last twenty days with
hardly any warning.  Smokey had passed on the twenty-fourth of last month
from complications of this damned disease.  His enlarged prostate had
swelled his urethra shut and he had stopped peeing.  At first, my wife
thought he had a blockage and she was watching over him, but somehow we
failed to notice that he had stopped peeing.  We were looking for the
wrong thing.  We thought Smokey would be alright until we could get him
into the doc's the next morning.  Our emergency docs were all at a
funeral that morning, however, and we could not get him in until that
afternoon.  When we finally got him to the docs, it was too late.  His
kidneys had started swelling and he was in renal failure.  They tried to
catheterize him, even tried to aspirate his bladder with a needle, but it
wasn't working.  We left him at the doc's hoping for the best, but later
got the call that no one ever wants to get, asking us what we wanted to
do.  Even though it was phrased as a choice, we did the only thing we
could do.  We let him go.
 
I am trying to figure out what's been going on here.  Both Smokey and
Dusty were both between four and five years old, both ferrets of the
tattooed-ear clan, both adrenal; I don't get it.  I am angry at myself at
first, for not knowing enough to help my guys, for missing things I feel
I should have caught, but my frustration slowly evolves into something
else, something for which I can find no outletŪ
 
I take a walk.  I bring my mp3 player with me so I can drown out the city
of Albuquerque.  I do not want to talk to people, do not want to hear
panhandlers ask me for spare change, do not want to feel obligated to say
"hello" to anyone, good, bad, or indifferent.  I am a lunatic in no state
of mind for even the slightest conversation.  I fumble with the buttons
on my player, and I drown out the city with "Frogtoise" by Schneider TM:
 
"Sometimes I dream of nothing
next morning, it's even worse
sometimes I wake up sweating
feels like I've just given birth
sometimes I don't wake up at all..
 
I had a dream
I cut a frog in half, a turtle too
to plant the top of the tortoise on
The poor frog's base
 
I'd love to meet you out there
to pet your heart and soul
discover all your beauty
and let the good vibes flow
but I've been called by a certain duty, cause in my dreamŪ
 
I cut a frog in half, a turtle too
to plant the top of the tortoise on
the poor frog's base
Now what you think?
How it looked at me, the one to blame
I felt ashamed."
 
I walk faster, crying and coughing.  It is such a poignant song.  I've
thought of it often during these last twenty days.  I've been wondering
why our ferrets contract these horrible diseases.  Is it genetics?  Sure,
it's genetics - why not?  I have no other answers; no real ones, anyways.
 
I blame genetics and Marshall Farms, and I focus my anger at them for a
bit.  Marshall Farms - putting together ferrets wrong since 1939.  I have
not had any ferret from Marshall's live past the age of six.  Smokey and
Dusty were only four and five.  It is hard not to blame them.  I think to
myself that maybe I could put Marshall's out of business, along with the
other ferret farms, and I could stop this, but my anger burns itself out
as I walk myself into a tired reasonability.
 
The truth is that I don't know whose fault it is.  I don't know with whom
I should be angry.  Somehow, we're putting tortoises on top of frogs and
it's coming out all wrong.  I cannot stop my ferrets from eventually
losing their hair and biting their cage mate's ears.  I cannot stop them
from stumbling, drooling, and staring out into space.  If I could crunch
the numbers and use microscopes to figure it all out I would, but even
scientists haven't been able to figure it out - how can I expect to?
I should not have to be a scientist.  I should not have to be a ferret
health expert to give my ferrets a normal lifespan, but I almost have to
be.  Too many ferrets are afflicted with these horrific diseases, and if
I don't attempt to learn things I cannot ease their suffering.  It is
what I have to do.
 
I understand when Schneider TM talks about not waking up at all.  For
those of us who keep ferrets, these diseases are a bad dream from which
we cannot awaken.  All I know is that it is me and my kind who are to
blame for this.  We are the ones who insist upon putting tortoises on
top of frogs.  We mass produce ferrets, alter them, and then put them
on airplanes before they are even weaned.  We mix and match ferrets for
colors and patterns, thinking little of the consequences of our whims.
And even though I know that I am not personally responsible, I am the
one who looks into my ferret's eyes when they are sick and dying, and
I feel ashamed for me and my kind.
 
I will walk tonight.  I will drown out the city with my music, my anger,
and my sadness.  In the morning, my wife and I will take Dusty - way too
soon - up to Josie's mountain to say goodbye.  I know that somewhere out
there, there must be a reason for all of this.  Please, somebody, tell me
that there is a reason out there.  I want this bad dream, to which I've
awoken, to make sense.
 
Roary
Albuquerque, NM
blog - http://ferretphilosophy.blogspot.com/
[Posted in FML issue 5062]