Thank you all for your suggestions and thoughts and concern.  Beener (his
name) has not improved yet.  We have taken him to a second vet who gave us
some new medicine (smz-tmp) and Nutri-Cal.  We have added Pedia-Lite to his
water but this seemed to retard his drinking so we stopped this.
 
We returned to the first vet (our usual family vet) and had an x-ray taken.
There seems to be a grey shaded area, like a gas coming from the stomach
but outside it, below his stomach at the beginning of his colon.  Tomorrow
morning we do an exporatory to see what it is.  Both the vet and we are
really getting concerned which is leading us to this drastic action.
Hopefully we will see the problem/cause during the exploratory.
 
Thank you all for all the information you have either sent us or pointed us
to - especially Dick Bossart for The Ferret Owner's Manual where we got a
recipe for Duck Soup which Beener accepts from a syringe.  Also especially
helpful was a pointer to Ferret Central (well, an indirect pointer via FML
which Web Ferret found www.ferretcentral.org for us).
 
We'll post another update when we find out more from the exploratory.
 
Thanks again,
Marsha
[Posted in FML issue 2653]