From:
Melissa
Date: 2001-05-27 12:16:00 UTC
Subject: Re: [Ferret-Health-list] High Calcium Level and
Lymphosarcoma
--- Teena Austin <austin@a...> wrote:
> My 3 year old, Liz, showed weakness in her hind legs
> two days ago and
> wasn't eating. She had shown no other symptoms of
> illness prior to
> this other than vomiting once about a week ago. Vet
> saw her
> yesterday; blood work was normal except for calcium
> level of 16 and
> found a very large mass in her abdomen. Ultrasound
> could not
> determine what organs may be involved.
You might reconsider and to an exploratory to see what
it is -- my experience is that it can be hard to
determine what's what in the abdomen without actually
going in. My Mishka had similar symptoms last summer
(not eating, vomiting when he did eat, lethargy, and
very small/narrow poopies) and from the x-ray, it
looked like he had a huge tumor in his lower left
abdomen. We did surgery because he obviously couldn't
continue that way and we figured that an exploratory
would at least be doing something and if it was not
possible to help him, we'd him go rather than to let
him continue to suffer (it was only a few days of
illness, but he'd had odd periodic symptoms for a few
months).
It turned out that his spleen was grossly enlarged -
it ran from up under his lungs to the very bottom of
his abdomen and had curled around, making a lump, down
at the very bottom of his abdomen. It was almost
6"long, and had pushed all his intestines over to the
right side of his belly. It was an odd case - you
couldn't really tell that the mass was the spleen,
because it was the lower lobe that got enlarged which
apparently isn't what usually happens in ferrets. We
biopsied the lymph nodes in the lower abdomen, because
they were enlarged, and both they and the spleen were
non-lymphomic.
Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that sometimes,
it's not as bad as you think -- and I sure hope it's
like this for you and your baby!
Best Wishes
Melissa
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