From:
Pam Sessoms
Date: 2002-04-08 17:57:00 UTC
Subject: Re: cardiomyopathy
Susan, it's great that you're doing the research - I've had two with
cardiomyopathy now and it definitely is a juggling act.
On Mon, 8 Apr 2002, Susan D. wrote:
> My question: if it is cardiomyopathy, how long can a ferret live with
> this condition?
It's highly variable... Depends on so many things: how advanced it is
when diagnosed, exactly what parts of the heart are affected, what
treatments can be tried, other concurrent conditions, ability to juggle
schedules to give meds on a schedule, just plain luck in a response to therapy, etc, etc, etc... In my readings, survival times were days to many months. My Sunny went about a year, which was excellent given that it was pretty advanced when diagnosed. Others have had them go even longer. My Sonic only went a few months, but she was had many many many other serious problems by the time she also had cardiomyopathy diagnosed. Sunny responded very well to treatments and
actually improved for a long time; Sonic never seemed to improve at all
(but again she was a very sick girl).
> And how exactly do they die from it? Drown from fluid in the lungs?
> Suffocate? Or do they basically have a heart attack?
How they die from it is also variable. Much depends on what
exactly the problem is with the heart. I think that most often, they are
probably euthanized because their quality of life starts to suffer too
much. Clinically, I'm getting out of my league and so this is probably a
gross oversimplification, but basically, if the left side of the heart
fails, fluid tends to go into the lungs; if the right side of the heart
fails, fluid tends to back up into the abdomen. There is a good
explanation about this at http://www.vetheart.com/diseases.html
Sunny was put to sleep pretty much because of her heart disease; she also
had insulinoma but it was well-controlled. All of the chambers of her
heart were enlarged and she had some very profound arrhythmias, but the
failure on the left side always seemed to be the worst for her, because
the major challenge was in keeping fluid out of her lungs. I was like you
are; it was simply unacceptable for her to drown in her own fluids. So,
diuretics, and several different kinds of them, were a big thing. She also
had other meds that worked on other things, like heart contractability,
blood pressure, etc, but diuretics were what we wound up playing with the
most. There is much more on that in the archives so I won't repeat it
here. At the end, I think we were giving her diuretics every 4-6 hours,
which was hard with a full-time job.
When we could no longer leave the house without constant worry that she
would start to wheeze, that was a good sign that it was time to start
really thinking about letting her go. It may sound like she was
constantly suffering from not being able to breathe, but really, the meds
did a good job of keeping her lungs clear. And we became very adept at
telling when she was getting fluid in her lungs, and we could halt an
episode in its tracks with a lasix shot and nitro paste on her skin. Very
near the end, even if we loaded her up with a lasix shot, we still could
not reliably have two hours of "guaranteed safe" time for us to leave the
house. It was horrible to think of putting her to sleep "just because she
might have an episode while we're out," but it really was more than I
could stand, to think of her struggling with no one there to help
her. So, we were very careful... But, she also became profoundly weak
right around then, and that's when we decided it was time to let her go.
Sonic also had signs of mostly left-sided failure, but we weren't at these
extreme ends with her heart when we let her go because of her myriad of
other problems.
Best wishes, and if this turns out to be what Ares has, I hope he responds marvelously to treatment,
-Pam S.
North Carolina