>From:    Regina Harrison <[log in to unmask]>
>I was just wondering if anyone knows why some ferrets' eyes reflect red and
>others green...
 
I've often wondered the same thing.  Cassie's eyes glow pink and Sammy's
glow green.  When Bud was alive his eyes glowed yellow.  Any experts on
ferret opthamology out there have the answer?
 
Speaking of ferret eyes, I recently learned that Sammy, like Amy Goldman's
ferret Thor a little while ago, has dislodged the lens of his eye (his
left).  Whether the structures which hold the lens in place broke down
somehow or just gave way during some trauma to the eye isn't known.
 
Many times in the past I've brought Sammy in for one eye or the other being
cloudy.  The vet always said he had probably banged his eye on something,
and knowing how exuberant Sammy gets sometimes, and how little attention he
pays to his surroundings at those times, I didn't doubt it.  The cloudiness
always cleared up in a day or so anyway.  However, after I read Amy's post
about Thor I was concerned again.  I had noticed that Sammy's left eye
hadn't looked quite normal for a while now.  When lit from above there
seemed to be a pool of light in the bottom, which wasn't seen in his other
eye.  It seems the pool of light was the lens itself.
 
The good news is there's no swelling or apparent pain; the lens fell
backwards and is sitting behind the bottom of the iris, unlike with Thor
where his lens was hitting the cornea and causing irritation.  I'll have to
keep an eye on Sammy in future for signs of irritation, but as long as the
lens remains where it is there should be no futher problem (other than him
needing glasses to read :).
 
In other news, I had Cassie in to the vet on the 6th to remove a tiny bump
that appeared on her shoulder this August.  It was only about 1/25 of an
inch across at the time, so he told me just to keep an eye on it.  It has
bled a few times since then, and may have grown a little, so I asked him to
remove it.  This was regular surgery, with anesthesia and the removal of a
fair bit of surrounding skin 'just in case'.  Cassie had about a two inch
incision on her back.  It didn't slow her down though; the next day she was
playing as hard as ever :).  Two weeks later her stitches are out, and she's
already grown back about a centimeter of fur (about 0.4 inches) on the
shaved area.  At a glance you can hardly tell anything happened.  The biopsy
results showed no cancer or anything else nasty.  What a relief!  It's nice
to have good medical news *this* Christmas :).
 
Hope everyone out there has a warm, wonderful, and above all fuzzy
Christmas this year :)
 
--
John Rosloot, Caregiver to Cassidy and Sammy
With loving memories of my dear departed Buddy (passed away 12/24/95)
Technical analyst, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Regina
Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada
http://www.cs.uregina.ca/~john/ferrets.html
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[Posted in FML issue 1792]