Janice,
 
One of our ferrets had adrenal surgery last week.  She thinks Duck Soup is
poison (ok, so she's perverse; she a FERRET!).  Our vet's advice was that
if she wasn't eating on her own the morning after surgery, we should
force-feed her Hill's A/D or meat baby food until she started to eat her
regular food.
 
"Force-feeding" in this case was a matter of dipping my finger into the
glop and letting her lick it off, but if she hadn't been interested I'd
have scraped the stuff off on the roof of her mouth so that she had to eat
it.  I offered Nutri-Cal every time I walked past her cage (she ate it
every time, beginning about 2 hours after surgery).  Ferrets don't have
much body fat in the summer, and they can go down very fast if they stop
eating for more than 24 hours.  I also offered unflavored Pedialyte from a
medicine dropper every time I fed her; when she started drinking on her
own, I put the rest of the Pedialyte in her water bottle.
 
I fed her approximately every 4 hours (daytime only; she wasn't sick enough
to require my getting up during the night) for a day and a half after
surgery.  By the evening of the second day she was chowing down on her own.
Over the years we've had several ferrets who required post-op care.  One to
two days of hand-feeding is all we've ever had to do.  So if you can arrange
to bring your ferret home from the vet on a Friday and spend the weekend
looking after her, she will most likely be eating on her own by the time
you go back to work.
 
One thing that your ferret will *not* feel like doing immediately after
surgery is climbing into her litter box.  I have a special post-op litterbox
that I keep handy for these occasions.  It's a Rubbermaid dishpan (you can
use any appropriately sized plastic container) with one side cut down *very*
low -- leave just enough of a lip to contain a small amount of litter.  Be
sure that she has lots of warm bedding to snuggle in and arrange the
bedding, litterbox, food, and water so that she doesn't have to walk very
far to reach anything, and she'll do just fine.  The recuperative powers
of ferrets never cease to amaze me!
 
Hope this helps.
 
ellen & the Gang of Three
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[Posted in FML issue 2408]