From:
miamiferret
Date: 2002-05-26 05:43:00 UTC
Subject: Re: question about a hardening I found
Good detective work, Kelly. It does sound like what you're feeling is
her spleen. An enlarged spleen can feel very hard and it feels like
it runs diagonally across their midsection, below the ribcage.
An enlarged spleen in ferrets is not that uncommon and can occur for
a number of reasons. It can be secondary to some other problem,
chronic inflammation, infection, etc., or it can be enlarged for
reasons that can't be explained. This seems to occur in older
ferrets. One of mine (Spaz, 5 years) has one right now and I can
only recall one out of my last four that didn't have one when they
got older.
The condition is called splenomegaly. There's another condition
called hypersplenism, but this has not been reported in ferrets.
A thorough checkup is in order to make sure everything is OK. There
may be something else going on and once that's taken care of, the
spleen will reduce in size. If it gets really large, there is a
possibility of rupture, which would be life-threatening. It can also
get large enough to compress other organs and I imagine it would not
be too comfortable. Sidney, our first ferret, had a HUGE spleen and
we had it removed. He did just fine without it. The others did not
get any specific treatment that affected their spleens and they did
just fine too.
mike
--- In Ferret-Health-list@y..., Kedda213@a... wrote:
> and said to her, "Gee, you haven't lost your winter weight" and I
poked her
> belly. When I did that I felt something kind of hard. I felt
around with my
> fingers and it feels like maybe a petrified-like organ or
something.