Melissa here,
 
Thanks to everyone for support and advice!  It makes it possible for me to
grit my teeth and be hopeful even when I see that Friday hates her condition
more than I do.  It's sad - after 20 minutes of play, she'll go curl up on
the floor next to the heater and just lie there, staring off at nothing.
She's never been one to accept much affection, so it's difficult to console
her.  We play all her favorite treat games, which helps.
 
The pred seems to have halted, but not improved, the progression of her
condition.  We're going to the vet early Saturday morning (guk!  8:45 am!)
to see what else we can do.  For those of you following this: she worsened
to the point where her feet were 'floppy' and she was walking (when she
didn't drag her hindquarters) by swinging each hip forward enough to place
the foot ahead of where it was; but she wouldn't use her legs at all, nor
her feet to push herself.  She regularly laid down to lick her ankles, hips,
and feet.  Her congestion problem actually worsened with starting the
prednisone dosages, but the partial paralysis, which had been proceeding at
quite a measureable rate, stopped at the level i described above.  Her
hindquarters and feet tremble quite a bit; if she's on her back and i touch
her feet or the side of her rear legs she yanks them back - great sensitivity
and feeling still there, they're still warm and pink.
 
She's confined to a cat carrier with hammock, newspaper, food, and water,
and let out two or three times a day to play for 30min-hour with Noodle and
Easel; this seems to be helping in terms of her not straining her back
overly and she doesn't (hopefully) get too bored.  I'm scouting around for a
playpen to use instead; the nice thing about the carrier is that she's
forced into immobility but this will be awful for her once she starts to get
better.
 
Cute story: Noodle, of course, doesn't understand why Friday's getting all
this attention, and Easel (the tasmanian devil ferret) doesn't understand
why Friday doesn't want to be jumped on - Easel's standard mode of play with
Friday used to be to bounce along after Friday when Friday was eating or
investigating something, and Easel would BOUND up and then PLOP down on
Friday and, of course, Friday would run out from underneath her and keep
doing what she was doing.  Easel would get soooo excited by this that she'd
go into a war dance, and three-legged weasels don't war dance very steadily
(as if it were a steady manuever in the first place) so she'd flop all over
the place, getting her MORE excited.  By this time Friday would've finished
crunching a piece of kibble and come back Easel's way and Easel would jump
on her all over again...so on and so forth.  Anyway, back to Noodle.  I was
playing a treat game with Friday last night where I drop a dried cranberry
into their water pan (which is tinted glass) and Friday snorkels after it.
I floated a few pieces of kibble in the water too and both Easel and Friday
were snorkeling and splashing to get the bits.  Noodle watched from afar,
and when Friday and Easel both retreated to munch their prizes, he came over
to the water pan and very carefully sniffed the entire surface of the water
because he's just never quite understood what that game's all about...
 
On changing the ferrets' environments - whenever I clean the ferrets' room
downstairs i put all their toys on top of the futon, and when I'm done
vacuuming they all emerge from hiding and have a BLAST tearing apart the
mound of tubes, tunnels, bags, towels, balls, and etc.  This is probably the
cheapest method of entertaining them I've ever seen.
 
Melissa
 
 ___ Melissa Litwicki __ [log in to unmask] ___
 By the whole newsgroup devoted tennis showing
     it after scarfing fork and laughters
[Posted in FML issue 1858]