>From:    [log in to unmask]
>Tonight, I noticed that my BEW, Sadie, has what appears to be an abessed
>tooth.
 
Rusty got one of those around November.  The whole side of his mouth
swelled up in a matter of an hour or so, and he looked like a chipmunk from
one side.  His gum near the affected tooth was red and white and very
inflamed.  We took him to the vet, who put him on antibiotics (amoxicillin)
for a week to take care of the infection, then took him back to have the
bad carnassial tooth (the wide one at the cheek) removed and the others
cleaned.  I have the tooth in a pill bottle; nearly all of its root is
rotted away.
 
The vet's guess was that the tooth had been in bad shape for some time, but
until the inflammation found a route to the surface it was just putting
pressure on the jaw area from the inside, and not causing anything visible.
With a ferret's usual annoying stoicism, Rusty never showed any signs of
anything wrong, even during the week he looked like he had a marble in his
cheek.  Hours after he woke up from the anesthesisa, he was happily
crunching away at his normal food, and he's been just fine ever since.
 
The mornl of the story: Get your ferret's teeth professionally cleaned if
they need it, and get an abscessed tooth looked at and removed before it
can damage the jawbone.
 
--
- Pam Greene                                   | If you were going to found
Ferret Central <http://www.ferretcentral.org/> | a preservation society for
   ftp://ftp.optics.rochester.edu/pub/pgreene/ | light, you'd want to invite
   INDEX FERRET to <[log in to unmask]>  | waveguides.-- Turan Erdogan
[Posted in FML issue 2556]