My 15-week-old fuzzy appears to be starving to death.  On Tuesday I
returned from work and Stimpy had had a raging bout of diarrhea.  While I
did not witness it, it appeared to have been very watery as it had been
splattered all over the cage and even outside of it.  I cleaned everything
(including him) from top to bottom and when I woke up Wednesday morning he
had soiled his clean towels during the night.  I repeated the cleaning
procedure again.
 
The stool had been brown...not green, but quite watery.  I noticed his
feeding behavior had changed that morning.  He would not eat all of his
food.  When I put fresh food in his dish he pawed at it and scattered the
food over the cage floor.  He picked out a piece here and there (possibly
just picking a favorite type since I mix three brands of pelleted ferret
food) half-chewed each selected piece but only ended up eating a bit of
each pellet and leaving a half-masticated bit behind.  Anything he eats now
is accompanied by excessive chewing as if he doesn't have the saliva to
sufficiently chew it.  Before all of this, Stimpy was a chow hound and ate
anywhere between 65-80 g/d.  He *never* pawed the food dish and almost
always ate everything in it.
 
Until this morning he still seemed to be curious and playful.  His stools
returned to a mostly formed state (normal to slightly paler than normal
color) on Wednesday afternoon.  I took him to the vet yesterday (Ginny Brown
in Raleigh) and they found a somewhat elevated temperature (103.5 F) not
parasites or ova in the stool, but on a Gram stain found quite a lot of
yeast.  I'm not certain if any of the stool was cultured.  Also, since
Wednesday evening, I noticed that his breath smells foul.  Stimpy says
hellow in the morning by licking my nose and my human nose has never noticed
an off-odor.  Now his breath smells acrid and sour...as close as I can
describe it is when I had my four wisdom teeth removed when I was 18 and for
a few days after the sur- gery my breath smelled like the breeze off of a
landfill.
 
The vet gave me amoxicillin and metronidazole in liquid form as well as
some Vitacal.  I administered the drugs last night after getting him home
from the vets, although I had to scruff him to get it into him.  Ten
minutes later he vomited it up again.  Dr.  Brown had said some ferrets
don't tolerate the metronidazole well.  I won't give him anything that will
make him vomit since he is so undernourished.  He is now eating less than
10 grams a day.  I don't think he has touched his pelleted food at all
since Thursday, although yester- day I was able to get him to eat some
freshly-cooked chicken and a little yogurt and peanut butter.  The Vitacal
was a bomb.  He ran away at the smell and wouldn't let me get near him with
the stuff.  *Sigh* This morning he ate perhaps 3 g of chicken and when I
offered him a raisin, he chewed it but did not eat it.  He is beginning to
look cachectic.  There is a deep hollow in the area between his rib cage
and his flanks and he feels bony.  When I let him out this morning he
urinated (very deep amber) and walked around the room for about 15 minutes
but then returned to his cage and curled up in his hammock and collapsed
back into sleep.  There are numerous possible routes through which he might
have been exposed to something and a friend at the university here (a
vet) suggested it could even be stress induced since I'm house-sitting at
the moment and there are two dogs in the same house (neither has physically
contacted Stimpy at all--they have been separated at all times).  He has
also recently contacted other ferrets, and had spent some time on Monday
exploring outside the house and digging in the soil.  Dr.  Brown thinks
that he has a bacterial enteritis and doesn't know what to think about the
yeast in the stool.  I am not interested in the source of contamination
right now but need urgent help on getting Stimpy re-nourished.  Comsuming
less than 10 g a day he will starve.  He is already lethargic.  If anyone
has any suggestions, please respond directly to me by e-mail.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
--
Jeff Johnston, Chapel Hill, NC
(e-mail: [log in to unmask])
[Posted in FML issue 1310]