From:
williamsdvm@comcast.net
Date: 2002-11-09 01:54:29 UTC
Subject: RE: More Zac...
To: ferrethealth@smartgroups.com
Message-ID: <27149284.1036806869247.JavaMail.root@scandium>
Dear Ulrike:
One possibility is that the tissue around the blockage was actually more devitalized than it seemed at surgery. Sometimes, dying tissue actually looks pretty pink at surgery - so you take aout a small section, when you really should have taken out a much larger or multiple sections, and the whole thing falls apart in 24-48 hours. There has been a lot of research into how to avoid this - injecting vital dyes into the circulation at surgery among aothers, and there really does not appear to be any reliable method. So we often go without gut instincts, educated guesses, and a wee bit of prayer.
With kindest regards,
Bruce Williams, DVM
Author wrote:
> Zac, the ferret with a rubber blockage in his small bowel was improving a
> lot yesterday. My friend and I visited him at the vets and he was eating a
> special convalescent diet. He was enjoying it. Then today my friend
> brought him home and on the way home he started acting strangely. He holds
> his head up high and lifts his top lips and breathes loudly and sort of
> retches. He didn't really want to eat when my friend and I fed him, he took
> 10ml of this liquid diet but not as well as yesterday. Then his strange
> breathing and retching got worse so I took him back to the vets. Vet
> x-rayed him which showed a bit of gas in the intestines. His temperature
> was slightly up. So vet changed his antibiotic to a stronger one gave him
> something to lessen the contractions of the intestine.
> Vet also said that when Zac had the operation 2 days ago, it was just in
> time, some blood vessels had started leaking blood into the surrounding
> tissue and he was in a bad state, the small bowel was ulcerated, then
> yesterday he was doing so well just to go downhill again this afternoon.
> Vet will do another x-ray tomorrow to see if another blockage is building up
> and may have to go back in but we hope not...
> Ulrike
> West Wales Ferret Welfare
> E-mail: ulrike@ferretlove.co.uk
> http://www.ferretlove.co.uk
> Last update 26/09/02