A Few Christmas Surprises Good & Bad

I found out my one ferret can pee standing up.  Not on four legs, but on two.  It was a very odd discovery, and one of the funniest things I've witnessed in ferret behaviour to date.

You see, my cats got some tuna juice for Christmas yesterday.  What I call tuna juice is the water in the can diluted with a bunch of regular water.  Well, Pepper likes tuna juice, I guess, and he drank a whole lot of it when we weren't looking.  There's salt in it, which is not good for ferrets normally, but in this case I think it was for the best.  He drank so much of it he was getting up to pee every couple of minutes.  It was very diluted, so there was a lot of water mixed in with it, so he got way too much water in his system, which is where the salt is a good thing.  Water intoxication occurs in people and animals when water flushes out too many minerals and nutrients.

Pepper wasn't exactly going pee in the proper places either, but we could hardly blame the little guy.  We have no carpet in our apartment, just cheap, brown, linoleum tiles that are supposed to look like wood...but don't.  No damage done, just a lot of toilet paper used to wipe up the mess.

Well, he was in a bit of a hurry to go pee again, and had started across a shoe box to find a corner, but instead braced his front legs on the box and let 'er rip while he was standing in that position.  Cheeky little devil wanted to show us what a man he is, I guess.

Normally a ferret flattens him/herself out in a corner, backing up to the corner itself.  I guess they don't want anyone sneaking up on them when they do their business, and backing up is something ferrets do very well.  The position they get in makes them look similar to a Formula One race car, which is rather different from a bipedal position to say the least.

Pepper sure knows how to make us laugh.  Needless to say I'm never letting him near the tuna juice again.  Even the cats only get it every few months because of what's in the tuna, and they're a lot bigger than a ferret with much less sensitive digestive tracts.  So, Pepper had to recover from Christmas like a drunkard.

Stimpy had an okay Christmas Eve, but Christmas Day has been very rough for him.  He doesn't want to be near food, his nausea is so bad.  I'm calling the vet tomorrow when they're open again, because this can't go on.  His kidneys increase and decrease in size, so I'm keeping a close watch on him.  More on that in another post.

Got money earlier than expected, so my daughter went to get some proper kibble.  Stimpy won't touch the canned food, which doesn't really surprise me.  He thinks of kibble as food, not the canned stuff, plus he's been really sick today so he wouldn't eat it even if he knew it was food.  It's good to have the kibble again, though.  When he does feel like eating again, it will be there for him.  He still had some left in his bowl, but I hate cutting it close like that.

Another good thing about getting money early, is the ability to buy some painkillers, along with my anti-nauseants.  I still don't have a doctor in Hamilton, which will hopefully change in January, so I'm not on prescription medication right now.  When I am, I've always been on Percocets, which I don't want to be on long-term anyway.  I have enough problems without having to deal with prescription addiction later on.  When I run out of pain meds or Gravol, I experience withdrawal and rebound effects as it is.  Percocets would be so much worse.  I take codeine in the form of Tylenol Ones, which are available here without prescription, if I don't have my normal prescription for the percs.  The problem with them is the quantity of acetaminophen and possible liver damage.

In my efforts to get away from narcotics altogether due to the nausea I experience and to avoid addiction problems, I asked my last doctor to put me on gabapentin.  I've tried it, it worked for me, and yet I went to him three times for the prescription and he still didn't do it.  I gave up on him entirely.  Gabapentin is a drug that's used to reduce the use of narcotics, particularly with post-operative care, but its main application is for the relief of neuropathic pain.  It doesn't help everyone, but it helped me.  I was off any other pain relievers as well as the anti-nauseant while I was on it, which made such a huge difference in my life for those two weeks I felt like a new person.

You wouldn't believe the difference.  I could think again, I could accomplish things, and I was able to leave the bloody house.  Being on drugs all the time renders me practically useless except for periodic bouts of writing.  If I didn't type so fast, I wouldn't even be able to do that.  I write during my more lucid times.  I've been lucid for quite a few days now, but also in a great deal of pain, which also makes concentration very difficult.

I would have to be careful being on gabapentin, because I have a tendency to overdo things if I'm not feeling pain and feel normal again mentally.  Even on the Percocets I would do too much and then really suffer for it later.  My condition is such that the more I walk the worse it gets, so I don't do myself any favours by being too active.  Nice, huh?  I have a built-in excuse for not exercising, but I hate it.  I miss being active.  I made up a modified exercise program that's safe for me, except for the fact that it's dangerous to exercise while on narcotics and Gravol.  Lack of balance, combined with slow reflexes makes for high-risk exercise.  I should be able to get back to it if I switch over to gabapentin permanently.

There's a doctor I've found in Hamilton who is relatively new here.  He's from Nigeria, and that's where he went to university, and he was just approved for practice in Ontario about a year ago.  When it comes to doctors I happen to like 'em young.  Why?  Well, they're more recently educated, so their knowledge is up to date, to start with.  Also, as much as they might seem overly cocky in their youth, they actually lack confidence as doctors still, so you can often get them to listen to you.  The good ones aren't afraid to go back to their medical texts (which is true of all doctors).  Also, he's trying to build his practice after investing a lot of time and money into his medical career, so he'll probably be nicer to his new patients.

The funny thing is, I'm not going to him to ask him for narcotics, either.  I'm going to him to be put on something that is not a narcotic.  I'm just determined that any doctor I see has respect for me.  My prior doctor's laziness is not something I'm willing to tolerate.  Doctors are employed by their patients, not the other way around.  If a doctor doesn't do his job, I'll find another one.  I had no real reason to find someone else before, because my needs were the simple once-a-year physicals for many years.  By the time I left my last doctor I was seeing him at least once a month, and twice a month before he extended my Percocet prescription.

I can't understand a doctor who is perfectly willing to keep me on narcotics like that, but won't try something that's a lot less dangerous.  It's lazy and irresponsible, and more than a little disgusting.  This is the problem with doctors today, once they've been family doctors for a while.  They get discouraged and listless, and it's the patients who suffer.  I understand their reasons, and the fight they go through with health care just to get paid, but I still don't think it excuses them.  If they don't want to help their patients, then it's time to try a different career path.

So, between a ferret peeing while standing, one being sick, myself being in tons of pain, but then getting money finally and knowing the pain is almost at an end, and being able to buy the right pet food, it's been a Christmas with a lot of ups and downs, some good, some bad.  We watched Home Alone 1 & 2, which I haven't watched in many years, so that was a laugh for us.  We also got to eat a couple of donuts with Christmas sprinkles and potato chips, washed down with Pepsi and cream soda.  Not our usual diet, but what the heck?!  You have to celebrate Christmas somehow.