As The Yarn Turns

Snow and Ferret Update

We actually had snow last night. Not much but at least we had a little. Unfortunately it disappeared quickly and turned to rain once the sun came up. Here's a picture of the snow on Rick's car before I went to bed last night.

I was hoping for several inches of snow and a snow day but I'll take what I can get.

In the meantime I seem to have picked up a sore throat and generally feel like crap. So now both me and the ferret are on meds. I've done some knitting here and there but nothing worth posting a picture. I'm just now getting into a routine of giving the ferret his meds.

Ferret Update

Balt is still hanging in there. I would feel better if he were eating better but apparently this takes a while to clear up. We ended up changing one of his meds. Balt hated the stuff. It really was horrid stuff and apparently worse tasting for ferrets. Besides, I decided I was trying to fix his ulcer, not create a new one. So we'll see how the new drugs do.

I'll do more catching up later.

by Sydney  |

Ferret Update

Many thanks to all of you for your good wishes. We've all needed it. The good wishes and the meds are working their magic. Balt is doing much better today. He's till got a long way to go before he's back to normal, but he's getting his appetite back and moving around a bit more. Talking to the vet this morning, we were wondering if that was the problem all along. Further testing will have to wait for a healthier day though.

Tonight we're going to move him from the sick cage to roomier vacation condo cage minus the loft. I never would have thought that a ferret could lose that much weight and that much blood from a bleeding ulcer and pull through. The poor guy is skin and bones. He has successfully gone through one set of meds so I'll be picking up more at the compounding pharmacy tomorrow. Compounding pharmacies are wonderful things. They'll turn human-sized doses into ferret-sized doses and flavor them for you. Speaking of which, I was telling Rick that Balt's ulcer medicine, carafate, puts a patch over the ulcer so he can eat without pain. Rick immediately says, "Oh, like Fix-A-Flat for stomachs." That's actually a pretty good description.

Balt and I did a little sock knitting, a little shawl knitting, and a little TV watching over the weekend. Well, I knit while he slept. It's not very often that a ferret slows down enough to sleep in your lap. There was very little knitting though and I haven't had a chance to take pictures yet. So I'll leave you with a picture of Balt resting and watching TV with his Dad. Balt wants you to know that the hair on his head doesn't always look so scruffy but he's had a very bad week.

by Sydney  |

Sick As A Ferret

I haven't felt much like blogging the past few days. I tend to hibernate when I get stressed and depressed. Our ferret Balt took a serious turn for the worse on Friday. Honestly every morning when I've gone in to check on him I've expected him to be gone but he keeps hanging in there. I was concerned that he had developed a stomach ulcer, so on Friday afternoon our regular vet recommended we take him down to Starkville, Mississippi to a ferret specialist. By the time we got down there, it turned out to be worse than I had expected. It turns out he did indeed have a bad ulcer and the vet suspects he has a couple of tumors. (He is an older guy.) Surgery was out of the question so we opted to treat the immediate problem and see how it goes. So now he's on three different drugs about six times a day. I'll feel a lot better if we can get some weight back on him.

As you might suspect, there has been very little knitting the past few days and almost no blog reading. So I'll leave you with a picture of Balt when he was just a kit. He used to turn over our recycle can so he could suck the last few drops of flat 7UP out of the cans. In his mind, Sprite wasn't the same, it had to be 7UP. I had forgotten how much darker he was then.

by Sydney  |