Hi everyone.  Thank you so much for your condolences for my loss of
Buttercup.  I miss her very much and wish everday I had her again to
hold.  She was such a precious baby.
 
I wanted to tell you a bit of the history here in the past two weeks.  I
had taken BC to a vet that deals with exotics here in Kirkland Washington.
Thinking he would know best how to treat her illness.  The only evidence I
had that something wasn't right was her loss of weight and appetite.  I
figured she had eaten a foreign object and surgery would remove it.
 
The vet said that she had a tummy infection after doing some exrays to rule
out the foreign object.  This vet had my little BC for an entire week.  He
had her on antibiotics and some fluids to keep her from being dehydrated.
I lost an entire week with BC because I trusted this vet new what he was
doing.  I had visited BC a few times while she was there and didn't notice
any changes at all but again I trusted the vet new what he was doing.
 
Just a day before I was to bring her home, the vet calls and asks me if I
noticed her dragging her leg.  Of coarse I didn't notice because when I saw
her she wasn't.  So I went and got her immediately out of there and took
her to the emergency vet here in my area.  She said it was either an injury
or perhaps the enlargement she had in her tummy put a pressure on a nerve
causeing her to be lame on that leg.  She favored more that it was injury
related because of the way she buckled her little foot.  She refferred me
back to the same vet to discuss my concerns.
 
The next day the vet calls me and explains to me that the radiologist who
took the exray didn't tell him that, oh by the way, she has a oversized
liver.  He apologized heavily, but that didn't help my BC nor the vet bill
I got built up while he treated her for something she didn't even have.  By
the time I got BC home she had lost more weight and was week and dragging
a leg.
 
I took her to another vet and they did an exploritory surgery and found 3
tumors in her that they removed and biopsied and the results came back as
cancer.
 
I'm sharing this with all of you because, as I think of what I could have
done with my poor baby after the fact, this is what I would have done
differently. ..
 
My BC had lost hair on her tail some months before along with Panda and
Max.  At the same time.  I figured since they all lost the hair at the same
time it must be due to environmental.  They all grew there hair back.  But
had I taken them into the vet to check for why they had the hairloss, we
may have found the cancer in BC before it had spread.  So, anyone with
hairloss on their babies, please go to the vet and find out why.  Your baby
may have cancer growing in there.  There were no visible sign of BC having
cancer.
 
I took BC to and exotic vet because I figured he specialized and had tons
of experience with ferrets.  My little BC came home mamed and so far worse
than she was before she went in.  The bill was 855.00.  I consider that
week hell week.
 
I would love to have brought BC home and fed her myself, and made sure she
had the water she needed.  The other vet didn't ask that I leave her there.
They let me bring her home to care for her.  Had I known I was going to
lose BC and that she was going to go through that I surely would have
brought her home.
 
If you can gather anything at all from what I've shared with you and it
helps you to avoid this same tragedy, that is my wish.  If not, thanks for
listening.  Try to spend as much time with your babies as you can when they
are sick and even when they aren't.  You just don't know when your going to
lose them.
 
Again thanks for your condolences.  It's so nice to hear from someone who
understands.
 
Maryanne, Panda, Max, and Ling Ling and since BC will always be in our
thoughts I'll include her here too.
[Posted in FML issue 2934]