There's always a rainbow! Okay, not always. But at least there's usually a light at the end of the tunnnel. Again, thanks to everyone who helped me out and sent kind words to us about Dustbin. You really helped so much! Mab is actually doing pretty well considering, although it's obvious she had more fun with another ferret around. She "speed bumps" a lot more now, but we try to entertain her as much as possible. Tonight we played "let's cause mom incredible pain by nipping the tops of her feet while she tries to cook pasta with crawfish tails". One of us enjoyed it very much. Incidentally, does anyone else else have this thing where, no matter what you name your pet, the vet receptionist people never spell it right? When I got my vet statement, it said "Dustybin"... This sort of thing always seems to happen to me. I never think that my pets' names are that weird. Any rate, so I'm looking at Mab a couple of days ago, and she's doing all these weird twisty carpet aerobics. Not like her normal ones, I mean. Different weird twisty carpet aerobics. Like she is a burrito rolling across the carpet. So I look at her and she has this thing on the back of her neck! An evil looking thing. So I look up "ferret skin lesions" on the internet and good ol' Bruce Williams has my answer. Sebaceous Epithelioma (http://www.afip.org/ferrets/Sebep/sebep.html). Good news for Mab (sort of -- I mean, at least they aren't usually malignant)... bad news for our checking account. It took a little miracle (okay actually it only took reams of paperwork and hours of phone calls to FEMA) for us to be able to pay Dustbin's bill. *sigh*. The vet is going to think I am the queen of postdated checks. Not to mention that I must keep my ferrets next to a nuclear waste dump for them to have all these problems. So... her appointment is on Wednesday and it looks as if I will be spending a few lunch hours at the plasma lab, with my copy of Richard Bachs' "Air Ferrets Aloft". However, I still have my hubby. And I still have my little fuzzy Mab to steal all the pens off my desk and to make endless attempts to jump onto the coffee table from the couch (and she should do fine because evil lesion couldn't have been there very long -- seems like she just had a bath a few weeks ago and I don't think it was there then, although she doens't get as many baths when the weather's cold). And I still have my little Quaker Monty to be the birdy Napoleon around here. And I get to be smug because I was a "Katrina" graduate at UNO -- although "graduating in the face of adversity" really doesn't have the ring to it that "facing down legions of evil penguins" or "climbing Everest with nothing but a shoe and a diaper pin" do, does it? Oh well. Meanwhile, watching Mab stop mid pen steal to roll around on the carpet shouldn't be funny, but I must admit, I snicker at her. I guess that's why she bites my feet to get my attention. A little pleasure, a little pain... -Christine [Posted in FML issue 5170]