JLo Is Gone

On Thursday night, I had to rush our ferret JLo to the emergency vet. She had insulinoma and cardiomyopathy. Her neck was stiff, and she didn't blink very often. I wondered if she had an insulinoma crash or if it was something much worse. She also had black, sticky poops, which is a sign a pet is digesting blood. Bartleby had that on his last day, too.

The emergency vet put her on oxygen and a heating pad and said that part of her heart wasn't working properly. She said that there was a lot of fluid built up in her abdomen, and they could drain it out, but it would likely cause her blood pressure to drop low enough to kill her. The only other option was to put her to sleep. Dave has been out of town, so I called him to tell him this. He didn't want to do it at first. He thought I should take her home and see if she makes it to the morning, and if she did, he wanted me to take her to our regular vet to get his opinion. He doesn't trust vets he's never worked with, and he didn't want anyone to tell him that he had to end his baby's life. I finally got him comfortable with putting her to sleep. I told him that if she came back home, she would be too cold and have too much trouble breathing, which was true.

I got the paperwork to have her put to sleep, but when I saw the cost of it, both Dave and I argued with the staff. They wanted to charge us about $100 to put her to sleep. Our regular vet charges $30, and then on top of that, if I wanted to be present when it happened, it was another $70 or $100. The fact that any practice makes patients decide whether or not they can afford to be with their baby in its final minutes of life is appalling. Dave decided that we had told her goodbye enough already since I was with her while I was trying to convince him she wasn't going to make it through the night. So, I went in the back to tell her goodbye one more time and give her a kiss. Unfortunately when I got there, she was already stiff and had been dead at least a few minutes.

Our regular vet spoke to me about her death and said that she probably had a stroke and had no chance of getting saved. He said that we might have been able to detect her cardiomyopathy earlier if we did an ECG scan, so we're going to do those on any older ferrets we have in the future. Right now we have Rocket who is five, and Leela, Raven, and Kirby who are between two and three at our best assumption, so I hope we have some time to go before anyone else dies. JLo was seven and a half. Here is a video of her playing with a beach ball I had in Chicago.