Hello from Sweden.
 
First of all I would like to thank all of you who took your time and
answered my inquiry about mastitis.  I hope that none of you were offended
by me not answering all of your mails.  The reason being simply that I was
busy running between vets, animal hospitals, kits and my work.
 
Here follows a summary of what happened to my jill.
 
First symptoms:
In the evening I noticed that she looked very tired and had left her
ferretkits alone.  I picked her up and examined her; one of her nipples was
black and the area around was really hard and swollen.  I took her to a
veterinary the following day.  She examined her (briefly) and diagnosed it
as MASTITIS.  She gave me a prescription of antibiotic, called :
Enrofloxacin (Bayer, Baytril vet. 15 mg)
Dosage 1/3 tablet each day for ten days.
 
Symptoms day after:
There are black spots spreading across her breasts and a faintly rutten
smell coming from her breasts.  I checked just now and there's a reddish
spot appearing on her breast, it is dark red and look like blood.  She is
also very warm, probably fever.
 
Symptoms after medication:
After being to the vet we started giving her the medicine.  Her general
condition improved quickly, the fever went down and she was soon able to
walk, eat and drink as normal.  Unfortunately her infected tissue got worse.
The black and red spots kept spreading and the milk would not come out.
After receiving several tips about putting her in a bathtub filled with
tempered water we decided to try that, our former method with soaked warm
towels did not succeed in getting the milk out.  While trying to get the
milk out, the necrotic tissue burst and out came a pinkish gore of clogged
milk, bacterias and putrid smelling stuff.  The hole in her skin between her
udder (teat) and her stomach was about 1 cm long.  She also had another hole
that was smaller.  By this time we decided to desinfect the wounds and rush
her to hospital.  Strangely enough she did not seem bothered by all of this,
if it was me having those holes in my body I would be lying on the floor
screaming.  But she didn't even lick her wounds or otherwise seem to notice
that she had a hole or two in her body.
 
The vet taking care of her decided to operate her.  They removed nearly all
of her mammary glands.  Some of the mails that I received said that they had
jills in the same situation but that they pulled through without resection.
But they also said that the vets decided this on a case to case situation.
But now she's back and taking care of her kits as usual.  A lot of doook
doook when they were reunited :-)
 
Once again; thank you all who took time to answer my inquiry and for giving
me advice.
 
Pictures of the happy ferret family (including the angora kits) can be found
at: http://www.student.nada.kth.se/~d92-sci/english.html
Choose "Ferrets" in the left frame.
 
Sincerely
Sevald Cirkov
[Posted in FML issue 1996]