Greetings to everyone--
I am very sorry to post that little Max did not have an enlarged spleen
after all.  After exploratory surgery with Dr. Weiss on Friday, it was
found that his intestinal lymph node was enlarged 15x its size (Dr. Weiss
said that it was a little smaller than a racquetball).  He took tissue
samples to biopsy and will have the results in about a week; this will
tell us the degree of severity and aggressiveness of the lymphoma.
 
He's on the slow road to surgery-recovery now and is pretty depressed.
Immediately after we stop the antibiotics, we start the Prednizone.
 
And even though he's not eating or drinking as much as he should, he has
enough energy to cause problems; the little scamp took it upon himself to
go ahead an begin removing his sutures yesterday and gave us a heart
attack.  He is back up with Dr. Weiss today to see if we need to re-stitch
or if we can just leave him alone to heal (you wouldn't BELIEVE the get-ups
we tried to get him into last night...we went through 2 packages of gauze
and nearly a whole role of medical tape...we even tried to put him into a
sock with arm and leg holes...to no avail).
 
Many, many thanks to all of the FMLers who responded to us during this
difficult time.  This is our first lymphoma case (Max was also our first
ECE case, our first Adrenal case, etc...what a little pioneer!!) and I'm
sure I will have many, many questions for the ferret experts who have seen
everything on this list!!  I don't know how you shelter people do it...our
two bedrooms upstairs (ferret roaming area) look like ferret-triage with
syringes and towels and plenty of NutriCal...last count put us at 3 open
containers(we just can't find an open tube when we need it!)!  So my hat is
off to you--and my heart goes out to all of the ill and sad weasels out
there.
 
best-
Tamara Stanton
[Posted in FML issue 3010]