Hey All: Well, it's been a rough week for the Weasels of Wyrdhaven. Puck (age 8) died suddenly and unexpectedly this Thursday past (the 18th). Autopsy turned up a kidney cancer of all things (the first our vet had ever seen in a ferret) that had spread to other internal organs and which had expanded his kidney to *7 times* normal size at death. (These sure are tough animals, aren't they....two days before Puck collapsed his was playing and bouncing like any older ferret.) As it turned out, one of our youngest weasels (Mica, age 2 1/2) had an ear infection as well, so we took her in for an exam at the same time we went to pick up Puck's body (the 20th). Turned out she has a large, rapidly growing mass in the back of her jaw, on the right hand side. Our vet feels it's almost certainly cancerous since she was unable to find any signs of infection in the mass itself (the ear was probably infected because the mass had closed off her Eustachen tube, which is what drains the ear). On the other hand, its sudden appearance (she had NO signs of this a couple of weeks ago) and general overall health seem to indicate a cyst or other infection. She also had a fairly high fever which is consistent with an infection, but that could have just been the problem with the ear. The mass is inoperable where it's located so....we have a tough choice. Since the 20th we've been hand-feeding Mica soft food (she can't eat anything hard now due to swelling of her jaw), giving her antibiotics and colloidal silver, and generally trying to keep her energy up. She runs and plays as much as she can, and her sense of balance (while shaky) is still good. Her jaw is heavily swollen at this point though she doesn't seem to actually be in *pain* until we feed her...the action of swallowing would appear to cause her some discomfort. Her weight has remained mostly good...she's probably lost a few ounces in the past two weeks from her "ideal" weight, but the 20-30 cc's of food she'll eat each day seem to be minimizing any loss. Our hope has been that this is indeed an infection of some kind and that we'd be able to knock it down, but it's not looking good--the swelling is worse than it was, though her fever is gone. Our vet says any operation is really out of the question--her whole right jaw would have to be removed to get this thing, and (if it's a cancer) anything that got left would almost certainly start the whole mess over since it's so aggressive. Right now we're mostly just trying to give her time, and keep her energy up, so that if this *is* an infection she can fight it off. If she gets much worse we're going to have to have her put to sleep, since she won't be able to swallow at all. If she knocks this thing back--if we can get *any* real indication that this is an infection--then we'll keep fighting. Anybody out there run across something similar? Steve and Colleen From the High Mountains of Colorado [Posted in FML issue 2877]