Our Poor Little Guy

It was a rough day yesterday.

Dude hasn't been eating well, so I took him to the vet. There, we learned two things. The first is that he's lost half his body weight. I knew he was looking and feeling skinny -- that's what we were worried about, after all -- but I was astonished at how much he'd lost. We thought he'd missed me when I was in Vegas; he started eating more when I got back, it seemed. But it still seemed to be causing him discomfort, and soon his eating slowed again.

It turns out that he has lymphoma (or at least, that's the preliminary diagnosis). He has tumors on his throat making it uncomfortable for him to eat. The doctor told me there were three ways to deal with it: formal chemotherapy, large doses of steroids (prednisone), or doing nothing. Chemo, he said, will give him a prognosis of 6 months to a year. The steroids -- which we were already giving him for his insulinoma -- will give him about the same. He didn't say what doing nothing would mean.

We opted for the steroids. Chemo is hard enough for a person to go through; I don't want to put a pet through that. Plus, a handout they gave us said that ferrets already on pred don't do as well with traditional chemo. But we were already giving him pred, so it was simply a matter of upping the dose. We hated the diagnosis, but I couldn't help feeling good about taking some action against it. I just wanted Dude to eat again, and put on some weight.

But now, I just got a call from the vet. Apparently Dude's blood sugar levels are really high, and he doesn't want to up the pred level until he gets the lab results back for the lymphoma test. (A guy on the phone told me we'd have them Monday, but with the holiday I suspect Tuesday or even Wednesday.) Neither Kathy nor I are happy with this. The doctor already said he was 99 percent sure, and we want to fight this thing. But we don't know what complications he'll have from high blood sugar, either.

We're wrestling with what to do. Meanwhile, we're putting a party together, frustrated by this uncertainty and back-and-forth. Dude's not at a point where he needs constant attention or anything, but I still feel pulled in too many directions.

Rob