A question for the vets....
We were told our oldest and smallest ferret, Tia (four and a half years old,
usually her weight is slightly under a pound to slightly over, depending on
the season) has a somewhat irregular heartbeat during her last check-up.
It will do a "triple" or "gallop" beat at random intervals. Since she has
always been a retiring, quiet ferret that sleeps a lot, we figured the two
were related.
Well, lately, she's been doing that really, really deep sleep -- the Dead
Ferret Panic -- a lot. The first time it happened, I wasn't too worried.
All our ferrets do this occasionally and I almost always have my heart jump
out of my throat. But I've found her in this condition at least five or six
times in the past week. This evening, I was lying on the bed with her
snuggled up next to me and felt a funny twitching in her chest muscles. I
picked her up and she was playing Dead Ferret. I shook her gently, SEVERAL
times, tickled her, checked for her breathing, patted her feet and was about
to scream for Kirk to call the vet when she FINALLy blinked her eyes. She
still didn't do the stiffen-up-and-stretch reaction that I usually get when
waking her up. She wasn't that dead limp, but still pretty limp. She
half-curled up in my hand and stayed mostly asleep, so I layed her back down
on the bed next to Beezie to snooze.
My question is this -- could this be a worsening of her heart condition?
She's only recently in the past few months really perked up and played with
us a lot, and that has dropped off in the past week too. Is the limp
sleeping thing normal to occur this often? Should we have her heart
rechecked? *sigh* And she was just getting so perky and finally gaining
weight, too.
Michelle
Flutist
--
Meet my pets. The ferrets (Taz, Coffee, Daphne, Tia, Gretchen, and
Beelzebub), the gerbils (34 of them), the rats (seven of them), the budgies
(Sky and Cindy), the cockatiels (Snow and Spice), and the fish (various).
RIP Honey, Summer, Grendel, Peggie, Timmy and Racer.
[Posted in FML issue 1706]
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