Jebabba is back with me

Last week, Steve picked up Jebabba's ashes for me. After he brought him home, I rearranged all of my lost babies on their shelf and lit a candle. Cheeba is in the middle, Bonk and Jebabba are on either side of him, and then Sophie and Mojo are on the outside. They're all together again. As I sat there and looked at their ashes, I thought about all of the wonderful memories they gave me and how much I missed them, and I started to cry. Frank came wandering over to see what the deal was, so I picked him up, and he licked my tears. He licked my cheeks and my eyelids very persistantly, and even in the midst of my tears, I couldn't help but laugh. That's why I love ferrets - even when you're feeling horrible, they know what to do to make it better.

An autopsy revealed that Jebabba had hepatic lipidosis caused by an inability to absorb nutrients (caused by his IBD). A normal liver is brown, but his was bright yellow. Every normal liver cell had been replaced by fat cells. A normal liver can heal itself and regenerate normal cells again, but his wasn't. The liver failure caused nausea, vomiting, clotting problems, lethargy - all of the symptoms I saw in the week leading up to his death.

It's odd that even with a better diet than he had been eating he still wasn't able to digest food properly. My guess is that even though we were controlling the inflammation, he had lost so much of the absorptive surface of the intestines that what happened was inevitable. I took comfort in the fact that the vet said there was nothing we could have done because he was too far gone and too weak to heal himself. I would have hated to let him go if there was something I could have done to make him better.

Tags

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ferret, ferrets, IBD