From:
Roger Vaughn
Date: 2002-06-02 12:30:00 UTC
Subject: Re: help--sick ferret
> Eddie, a 3-year old male in otherwise good health, presented
> with a sudden onset of hind end weakness accompanied by
> florescent green and watery diarrhea with lethargy and a
Florescent green diarrhea sounds like ECE. If he or you have
interacted with any other ferrets lately, he may have contracted the
ECE virus. Go to http://www.miamiferret.org/fhc/ for more info on ECE,
or do a search at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Ferret-Health-list/
for "ECE". Warning: you will find a LOT of posts. I'm surprised your
vet hasn't mentioned this possibility - you may want to print out some
of the materials and take them in with you.
With all of that diarrhea, he may very well be dehydrated by now, even
though he is still drinking. Please get him to your vet on Monday for
more help. He may need subcutaneous fluids to help him out.
You're going to have to get food into him somehow. One of the easiest
ways is to get a large syringe and (slowly!) squirt softened food into
the side of his mouth. Your vet will probably give you a suitable
syringe if you ask.
If he is grinding his teeth, it's probably because his stomach hurts.
Carafate (sucralfate) (ask your vet) or Pepto-Bismol may help here.
Unfortunately they hate Pepto as much as they hate Flagyl. The stress
of giving either of those two can sometimes make them worse.
Meanwhile, you can also food him some bland food to help disturb his
stomach less. Plain chicken or turkey baby food is good (the foods
with only meat and cornstarch - nothing else), as is Bob Church's
chicken gravy or a duck soup. The plus is that all of these are smooth
and work well in a syringe.
Good luck with him, and by all means, please get him back in to your
vet tomorrow.
I am not a vet.
Roger & the Fibonacci Ferts
[Moderator's note: Searching the FHL archives is usually a fine suggestion, but searching for the three letters ECE is useless, because it returns *every* message ever posted to the FHL! All the messages have a "received:" header element, which contains those three letters. For other gory search engine tips, please go to
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Ferret-Health-list/files/Archives_Search.html
The FML (not FHL) search engine works much better for an ECE search. The FML archives search engine is at:
http://listserv.cuny.edu/Scripts/wa.exe?S1=ferret-search ]