alonewiththemoon | (no subject)

We had our vet appointment for Pan this morning. He's still there, waiting for an ultrasound. In addition to the enlarged spleen, the vet felt another distinct mass, but she couldn't get at it clearly enough to tell for sure what it was. So, an ultrasound for identification of the mass, and if there are no major blood vessels in the way, a needle aspirate for a biopsy. Could be a lymph node, could be an adrenal gland. He also appears anemic, but that's only to be expected if he hasn't been eating enough. He's 200g below what his weight was back in July, but since he should have been putting on winter weight, I'd say he's really more like 300-350g below what he should be. His heart and lungs sound fine, so at least we can rule out any heart or lung disease. But the gist of it is that he's not a well ferret, and we won't know more until after the ultrasound. The two major contenders would be adrenal gland disease (I guess the best case scenario, sad as that is to say) or lymphoma. If it's the latter, I have to think long and hard about chemotherapy. When my older ferrets had lympho, saying no to chemo was easy, because clearly to me it was not worth making them suffer a lot for a few months just to buy them a few more months of not very high quality time. But with a younger ferret--I don't know. Anyway, I'll cross that bridge if and when I come to it. Pan clung to me throughout the visit and it was very hard to leave him there.

in other news, we had no heat or hot water this morning, but that's a small thing today.