Spooky my number one PR jill is sick. Saturday morning she was a very flat ferret, far away look in her eyes more or less out of it. I rushed her to the vet, a 5 minute walk for me. Fortunately the vet that was on duty was one of the ferret friendly ones. Anyway Nicky gave Spooky a check over, Spooky seemed to be in pain when Nicky was feeling her abdomen, and decided to keep her in from observation and treatment. Spooky's treatment so far consists of keeping her on a heat pad (her temperature is 99.9 a bit on the low side), regular subQ fluids, she was dehydrated on Saturday morning. A couple of the vet nurses are also feeding Spooky with liquidised Ferret Complete - I took in a bag of Spooky's usual Ferrets Choice... feeding her a different complete food won't help the diarrhoea. Symptoms, discharge from eyes and nose, dark stools - possibly passing blood, breathing a bit laboured, loss of appetite, not drinking, lethargy, general weakness in limbs. In other words she's a very sick ferret. Had a fairly long chat with a South African vet (the first vet was from Oz), he was very keen to get to the bottom of Spooky's problem. Made various suggestions as to what it might be but was going to phone a lab to see just what tests they could do. He wants to take scrapings from her eye and nose discharge (CDV test), stool sample for parvo and VHD, and blood ADV. I think he's just about got all bases covered. Spooky is a rather large jill, the vet commented that she looked as if she'd just gone down with the illness today and not several days ago, he said that they lose weight very rapidly when sick so Spooky being overweight might just help to pull her through. BTW Spooky has been vaccinated against CDV and all the other six ferrets that are in her group aren't showing any signs of illness, they were all rocketing around the living room this morning... I think the fact that all the others are fine is confusing the vet even more... I do have two un-vaccinated jills - they haven't been in close contact with Spooky but they have been using the same exercise area. If it is CDV the vet mentioned that euthanasia would be kindest - he was surprised when I said that I knew of two ferrets that had recovered from CDV. One had the shakes but lived her life to the full, and the other one had weakness on one hind leg. -- Sheila Bolton Ferret Welfare. Author of "All about your Ferret" - Ringpress ISBN 1-86054-171-2 (UK) Barron's ISBN 0-7641-1189-2 (USA & Canada) NFWS. Web Site: http://www.n-f-w-s.co.uk last update 27 September 2000 Web Site: www.sheila.btinternet.co.uk/bolton.htm last update 27 September 2000 Waiting at Rainbow Bridge: Jill, Deanna Troy, Cameron, Carnath, Button, Bill, Bobby, Jasper, Inga, Holly, Fergle, Amanda, Sparky, Daniel, Blackie, Marvin & Claude [Posted in FML issue 3193]