HI everybody,

I know a lot of you have said this before, but I'd like to join
everybody who says "If you're worried about your ferret, please
take him or her to the vet!"

After his birthday, Zorro, although he was eating, drinking, peeing and
pooping just fine, walking, running and hiding things as normal, had
stopped jumping and dancing. And he'd started doing a weird sort of
"restroom relay" where he'd race back and forth from latrine spot to
latrine spot, turning around without even trying to "go," just running
back and forth, to and fro, until finally stopping to poop or pee
completely normal poops and/or pee. . .AND he also looked as if he had
lost some weight. . .I wondered if he had the beginnings of a blockage,
or a UTI, or something.

So I followed the time-hallowed advice and took him in, and the vet
diagnosed him with a clostridium overgrowth in his GI tract (no, not
"C. diff" and not botulism--this kind is an auto-immune problem
possibly aggravated by a food sensitivity)

He's now on metronidazole 0.2 given 2 x/day, famonitidine 0.1 given
1x/day p.m. and prednisone 0.1 given 1 x/day p.m.(in addition to the
enalapril that he gets every morning for his kidney functioning) and,
apart frm the first one which he HATES, he takes all the others like
a lamb.

The good news is that we caught it--and another piece of good news is
that his kidney function has improved in the past three months! All
his readings are better than they were in December, so that is nice
to hear.

Anyway, thank you all for wishing him the best, and remember that "It's
better to take your ferret to the vet and find out there's nothing
wrong -- than to NOT take your ferret to the vet and wish, too late,
that you had..."

Wishing everybody the best,
Kate, Zorro and Mickey (and, as someone wonderful used to always
say,"May all your ferret tales end 'happily ever after.'" )

[Posted in FML 7723]