Gulp!

Another update on the Dude. He’s been eating better and gaining weight with a new medicine regimen. Kathy & I were giving him a shot three times a week, which I found a lot easier than I expected to. Also, there was a new vitamin supplement that he absolutely adored.

Then, last week, Kathy took him back to the vet. We were expecting him to get a biopsy on the enlarged lymph node near his hind leg; we’d vetoed the procedure last month because he was so thin and weak, but it looked like he’d be able to weather it now. But when Dr. Kim saw him, he said the biopsy was unnecessary; sadly, he was able to tell just by feeling the outside of him that it was cancer. At this point, our job is to make him comfortable.

The Dude’s big issue in the coming months will be liver function. Dr. Kim said the Dude could get along pretty much fine even down to only 30 percent of his liver function; after that, he would decline. So he gave us some medicine to take care of the Dude’s liver.

One medicine, thankfully, he loves. He takes it in a dropper and laps it all up.

The other medicine, however, is (half of) a pill. We still haven’t been able to give it to Dude successfully. We tried to pill him outright, and he put up a tremendous fight and got very stressed out and frothy -- and never took the pill, even if we got it in his mouth. We tried to crush it and put it in peanut butter. No dice there, either. Last night, I crushed it even more finely with a mortar & pestle. Then I gathered up the powder and put it into a syringe with a vitamin supplement he really likes. He ate the supplement, but the powder just became a glop at the tip of the syringe.

So I carefully added some water to the syringe. I hoped it would dissolve and I could use the dropper to get it into his mouth. After a while, it did dissolve, sort of, and I squirted some into Dude’s mouth. He hated it, but I tried to get more in before he squirmed away. I had dissolved it in a fair bit of water, much more fluid than I usually give the Dude at once. I squirted a bit more, and he started to gag.

That’s when I realized I was waterboarding my ferret.

Today Kathy plans to pick up some pill pockets—little pet treats with a hole to hide pills in. I hope that works tonight. I can deal with a necessary moment of unpleasantness to get some medicine down the hatch. But I have to draw the line at torture.

Rob

UPDATE: We've come up with another, fairly successful, method for giving pills to a ferret.