Our six-yr-old ferret, Tally, has been diagnozed as having insulinoma.  She
was operated on about 10 months ago, but as expected, she has started having
the bad symptoms again.  Her non-fasting glucose level is 40.
 
Anyway, she's too weak to go under the knife again, at least right now.  We
have decided to put her on prednisone for the time being.  From there, we
may consider surgery.  We've given prednisone to her twice and she's
responded very well to it -- she's romping all around.
 
But she absolutely hates the taste of the stuff!!  We opted to give it to
her as a syrup of .5 cc twice per day versus shoving a pill down her throat.
But she just slings her head and spits it out when we give it to her in a
syringe.
 
I seriously doubt that she will eat her food if we crumble up a pill and put
it in her food.  She's rather finicky and doesn't eat a whole lot anyway
under her current condition.
 
Our concern is two-fold: 1)she's not getting the medicine and 2)she could
die from the stress (we lost our first ferret, Bear, when he was force-fed
under the vet's care [a different vet than we have currently]).
 
Does anyone have any experince with this and can offer any advice on how to
give this stuff to our little fuzzy?
 
        Thanx, Bobby and Jane (and Tally)
[Posted in FML issue 1813]