Tag: lymphoma

Draco is gone

More sad news…Draco passed away today.

We had taken him to the vet this week after noticing his weight was rapidly decreasing. The physical found pretty much nothing wrong with him at all, except the weight loss and some poor quality stool. The tentative diagnosis was IBD…with the usual caveat of potential lymphoma. Both are very common with ferrets, and both are difficult to diagnose accurately without surgical biopsies.

We opted to treat for IBD with metronidazole and vitamin B shots. He was on the meds for several days, and received them this morning. But tonight when I went to rouse the furkids for playtime, he was curled up comfortably in bed, and had passed away. The situation is pretty much identical to that we experienced with Ysabell, so it seems he likely had lymphoma after all, and something catastrophic happened, such as a rupture.

Good-bye Toe-cruncher…you will be missed.

Minion is back home

Well, that was an unnecessarily exciting weekend, in the worst way.

Minion had a perforated intestine! It perforated at some point several hours after the time when we rushed him to the vet, by her estimation…and he came within hours of dying from it. He also nearly died while she was fixing it, being in shock and suffering from sepsis in his abdominal cavity from the food and fluids that leaked out. His systolic BP should’ve been around 90…it was 25. It’s extremely lucky that he pulled through with all that suddenly went wrong. Our vet and her tech assistant are just plain awesome. A huge thank you to Dr. Powers and Christina, they saved Minion’s life again!

He came home this afternoon, and is recovering nicely thus far. He gets antibiotics and pain meds for a week or so, and goes back for a recheck in 2 weeks. We’re also having the 4 inches of his intestine that were perforated (and thus removed) sent for a biopsy, as they had small white dots that could be indicative of lymphoma. Better to know there so we can put him on some meds to keep it (hopefully) from happening again.

He also had a small pancreatic tumor as suspected (the insulinoma diagnosis) that was in an extremely difficult to reach place. She was able to remove that as well.

Thank you to everyone who contacted us over the weekend to inquire how he was doing. Hopefully his recovery goes without issue, and in the future months our old man can enjoy a less eventful time of things.