In part of a forwarded message a few days ago:
 
> (They seem to get really sick real fast.)
 
I think this is the critical lesson of all this -- pay close attention to
your ferrets and TAKE
THEM TO THE VET when there's something amiss.  We need to do this with Rael
next week because she just hasn't been playing recently very much.  It may
be the
winter light, or it may be something else.
 
Case in point:  several months ago, we noticed that one of Glitz's eyes
seemed to be
a bit cloudy.  We brought her in, and it turned out that the eye had an
infection from
a trauma.  The vet gave us some antibiotics to put in the eye, and two other
types of
eye stuff (one of them, I forget which, to go in EIGHT times a day), and
said that
Glitz probably would lose some vision.  Well, we religiously caught that
ferret and
put the gunk in her eye (and usually it required two people for the times we
had to
put more than one type of thing in), and a week later the vet gave us some more
drops, which we put in, and several weeks later, the eye was JUST FINE.  Partly
because we did what the vet asked, and Glitz mostly cooperated (Rael was upset
that we weren't pinioning her, of course), but she would have definitely
lost vision
in one eye, and been in danger of the infection spreading, if we hadn't
brought her
in when we suspected something was wrong.
___________
Sherman Dorn
Vanderbilt University
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[Posted in FML issue 1061]