Moby was four and a half. For the past few months he’d been sleepier than the others, lounging about in the hammocks and looking at us sleepily when we roused the others for treat time. We told him he was a fat lazy weasel and laughed over it. Other than that he was fine until a few days ago. Thursday, when I was cleaning their room (our ferrets have their own bedroom to free-roam) I noticed something was definitely not right with him. He seemed exceedingly fatigued and was having a hard time using his back legs. I whipped out my Ferrets for Dummies (a very good book, despite the title) and boom, Insuloma – one of several cancers to which ferrets are prone. We tested his blood sugar (I have a kit, I’m diabetic) and it was 66. Normal range for ferrets is 90-120. This bolstered my fear. We took him to the vet on Friday, she pulled blood (from his jugular, ferrets veins are tiny) and the results confirmed that not only did he have Insuloma but also the beginnings of Adrenal disease, yet another ferret cancer. We felt that we had caught it early, and that we could treat the Insuloma with prednisone, which would raise his blood sugar and make him feel a lot better.
Saturday morning, he was vomiting excessively. Ferrets are not vomiters, so if they’re throwing up, something’s really wrong. When I pulled him out of the cage he was basically limp and exhausted. I felt a strange large mass on the side of his neck where the blood draw occurred. He lay across Eric’s chest almost comatose. I called the vet, we took him in. The mass turned out to be a hematoma (pooled blood) from the draw, the size of a walnut. The vet was concerned that his blood was refusing to clot. Moby had perked up, grumpy at being at the vet’s office again, but he was clearly miserable. He had always been a surly ferret – wanting everything his way, playfully bullying the girls around to let him know he was boss (he wasn’t). His bold personality and his dignity were very strong for a goofy weasel. We were fairly sure that if he could talk, what he would say. We caught things at the beginning of a decline into a miserable and undignified stretch of time that would inevitably lead to his death. These cancers cannot be cured, only controlled for a time. We made the incredibly difficult decision that the only way to guarantee that he would not suffer physically or “emotionally” as he declined towards dying was to have him euthanized.
We miss him very much. The house is emptier without him.