Hi everyone, I've been reading each day with everything else going on with work, the shelter, Chewie's "plumbing" surgery and our recent rabies clinic if feels like forever since I've sent in a post. Even with every penny being so tight these days, I felt led to make donations towards the medical research for one obvious reason and one heartfelt reason. The first donation is from the hospice ferrets and ferrets from the fire of South Shore Ferret Care. All of these ferrets are alive and living comfortably thanks to the medical strides that have brought advances in managing insulinoma, adrenal, lymphoma, DIM, ADV, distemper and so much more... The second donation is in memory of my mother, Phyllis Wall, a school bus driver for 40 years, she passed away 5 years ago come this May 4th. I can tell you that as an only child with no family to lean on that more ferret folks than relatives were at her wake and funeral. She had rheumatic fever which caused heart problems her whole life, ongoing congestive heart issues and in the last year of her life she got a bad staph infection which necessitated IV antibiotics. Because she was on state insurance they only would pay for a visiting nurse to come every other day, but she needed two different IV antibiotics twice a day. It may sound silly, but those darn ferrets helped me to help her. Since I was used to giving the shelter ferrets sub-q fluids, lupron shots, I wasn't scared to learn how to tap an IV bag, check for bubbles, manage the flow, flush her ports, start her IV, change and administer the next one. Each morning it was up at four am to fed and medicate the shelter ferrets, then off to mom's to do the IV antibiotics, then off to work all day and the reverse at night, to mom's for IV antibiotics, to the fed and medicate the ferrets at the shelter and collapse into bed. Eight straight weeks of this. Each day she would say "good thing you got them fahhretts, they taught you how to help me". She always called me "Diane Doolittle" and said that I was like Ellie Mae Clampet with my "critters". Eight months later she was gone, quite unexpectedly, never waking up from a routine heart surgery. To this day, I am more attuned to the gurgle of a heart sound, a cough, the bluish tint on the belly and know not to give fluids as possible congestive heart failure in ferrets and more than familiar with lasix. The saying for the ferret folks in my area is that when one of our ferrets passes that my mom the bus driver, picks them up at the bridge and drives them to the gate of the rainbow bridge. That's a vision that still carries me to this day, a big yellow school bus with mended ferrets, wreaking havoc on the bus like kids, driving to the gate, with my Mom at the wheel. Diane at South Shore Ferret Care Rescue and Hospice [Posted in FML 7041]