From:
Lori Crawford
Date: 2001-08-13 03:40:00 UTC
Subject: insulinoma and major vomiting
Hello again-- thank you to everyone who suggested various ways of
getting the prednisone down without causing more vomiting. I've been
mixing it with a little of his regular kibble, wet and mashed up, and he
eats this by himself. Since I've started doing this, he hasn't vomited
right after taking his prednisone.
Unfortunately, he's still vomiting. He has episodes where his footpads
turn bright red and he throws up for an hour or two. After throwing up,
he usually eats whatever has come up, so some of it gets recycled, but
then he throws it up again. This leaves us all exhausted, and the poor
ferret gets dehydrated as well.
He is six years old and had surgery for a large insulinoma in May. The
vet was able to remove about 80% of a large tumor, so some of it is
definitely still in there and presumably growing. He's been on the pred
at 1.8 ml a day, twice a day, ever since the surgery.
Is there some reason besides the insulinoma that could be causing all of
this vomiting? And is there anything I can do? The first two times it
happened we rushed him off to the emergency vet (it always seems to
happen in the middle of the night) and both times I was told there
wasn't really anything they could do about it. The second time they
gave him subcutaneous fluids for the dehydration, but that was it. (We
are in Western Mass., and if anyone can recommend a ferret-knowledgable
vet out here, that would be great. He had his surgery at Angell
Memorial in Boston when I still lived in Cambridge, but we've moved too
far away since then.)
I know that pretty soon I'm going to have to make the hard decision of
when to have him put to sleep, but if there's anything I can do in the
meantime about the vomiting it would be really helpful. He only has a
vomiting episode once every 4-8 days, and in between that he seems to be
doing OK-- not a heck of a lot of energy, but he eats/drinks/poops well,
and will run and play and generally enjoy himself before getting tired.
Is there any medication to stop vomiting, or anything else anyone can
think of?
Thank you from both of the humans and from Unagi Inu,
Lori