S. sent me a private message that knowledge is power.  She's right.  Now
she is learning about blockages from what we went through, but we might not
have known fast enough if we hadn't read and learned from earlier posts
by others.  BTW, Ashling had NOTHING show up on her x-rays but she got to
within an hour of having the make the choice about surgery; x-rays can
show when the situation is very bad sometimes calling for rapid surgery, I
gather, but they aren't an elimination factor for surgery in general.  We
were told to jump IMMEDIATELY if she began any projectile vomiting; have
heard from a dear friend, D., with very long ferret experience that he and
his family had one who died within only a few hours of starting projectile
vomiting -- before surgery could be done.  (The vet was busy already with
another emergency.)
 
In light of what Ashling went through I sure can agree with that shelter
person who won't adopt out to people who let their ferrets have
unsupervised play with things even more likely to cause blockages, like
latex or rubber.  Cloth that finally digests was bad enough and almost
required major surgery; imagine if it had been one of those substances.
Then death would have been so much more likely.  I recall the early days of
ferret discussion on the Internet and how very many died so rapidly then
from those things; it's great to build a knowledge base so that foolish
mistakes can be avoided.
[Posted in FML issue 3175]