There's always a rainbow!
 
Okay, not always.  But at least there's usually a light at the end of the
tunnnel.  Again, thanks to everyone who helped me out and sent kind words
to us about Dustbin.  You really helped so much!  Mab is actually doing
pretty well considering, although it's obvious she had more fun with
another ferret around.  She "speed bumps" a lot more now, but we try to
entertain her as much as possible.  Tonight we played "let's cause mom
incredible pain by nipping the tops of her feet while she tries to cook
pasta with crawfish tails".  One of us enjoyed it very much.
 
Incidentally, does anyone else else have this thing where, no matter what
you name your pet, the vet receptionist people never spell it right?
When I got my vet statement, it said "Dustybin"... This sort of thing
always seems to happen to me.  I never think that my pets' names are
that weird.
 
Any rate, so I'm looking at Mab a couple of days ago, and she's doing all
these weird twisty carpet aerobics.  Not like her normal ones, I mean.
Different weird twisty carpet aerobics.  Like she is a burrito rolling
across the carpet.  So I look at her and she has this thing on the back
of her neck!  An evil looking thing.  So I look up "ferret skin lesions"
on the internet and good ol' Bruce Williams has my answer.  Sebaceous
Epithelioma (http://www.afip.org/ferrets/Sebep/sebep.html).  Good news
for Mab (sort of -- I mean, at least they aren't usually malignant)...
bad news for our checking account.  It took a little miracle (okay
actually it only took reams of paperwork and hours of phone calls to
FEMA) for us to be able to pay Dustbin's bill.  *sigh*.  The vet is going
to think I am the queen of postdated checks.  Not to mention that I must
keep my ferrets next to a nuclear waste dump for them to have all these
problems.  So... her appointment is on Wednesday and it looks as if I
will be spending a few lunch hours at the plasma lab, with my copy of
Richard Bachs' "Air Ferrets Aloft".
 
However, I still have my hubby.  And I still have my little fuzzy Mab to
steal all the pens off my desk and to make endless attempts to jump onto
the coffee table from the couch (and she should do fine because evil
lesion couldn't have been there very long -- seems like she just had a
bath a few weeks ago and I don't think it was there then, although she
doens't get as many baths when the weather's cold).  And I still have my
little Quaker Monty to be the birdy Napoleon around here.  And I get to
be smug because I was a "Katrina" graduate at UNO -- although "graduating
in the face of adversity" really doesn't have the ring to it that "facing
down legions of evil penguins" or "climbing Everest with nothing but a
shoe and a diaper pin" do, does it?  Oh well.  Meanwhile, watching Mab
stop mid pen steal to roll around on the carpet shouldn't be funny, but
I must admit, I snicker at her.  I guess that's why she bites my feet to
get my attention.  A little pleasure, a little pain...
 
-Christine
[Posted in FML issue 5170]