>From: [log in to unmask] >Tonight, I noticed that my BEW, Sadie, has what appears to be an abessed >tooth. Rusty got one of those around November. The whole side of his mouth swelled up in a matter of an hour or so, and he looked like a chipmunk from one side. His gum near the affected tooth was red and white and very inflamed. We took him to the vet, who put him on antibiotics (amoxicillin) for a week to take care of the infection, then took him back to have the bad carnassial tooth (the wide one at the cheek) removed and the others cleaned. I have the tooth in a pill bottle; nearly all of its root is rotted away. The vet's guess was that the tooth had been in bad shape for some time, but until the inflammation found a route to the surface it was just putting pressure on the jaw area from the inside, and not causing anything visible. With a ferret's usual annoying stoicism, Rusty never showed any signs of anything wrong, even during the week he looked like he had a marble in his cheek. Hours after he woke up from the anesthesisa, he was happily crunching away at his normal food, and he's been just fine ever since. The mornl of the story: Get your ferret's teeth professionally cleaned if they need it, and get an abscessed tooth looked at and removed before it can damage the jawbone. -- - Pam Greene | If you were going to found Ferret Central <http://www.ferretcentral.org/> | a preservation society for ftp://ftp.optics.rochester.edu/pub/pgreene/ | light, you'd want to invite INDEX FERRET to <[log in to unmask]> | waveguides.-- Turan Erdogan [Posted in FML issue 2556]