I took him to the vet, but they have a number of vets on staff and the one that I normally have treat my ferrets wasn't in that evening.  Another vet saw him and gave me no reason for hope.  However, she insisted on keeping him overnight and giving him a glucose IV treatment.  She also started him on Amoxicillin, as he was starting to get diarrhea.

The next day, I was told that I could come get him.  He wasn't any worse, but he didn't appear to be any better, either.  It was decided that he was insulinomic and that prednisone was the recommended treatment.  Unfortunately, the sicker he got, the worse he tolerated the prednisone.

I increased the dosage, hoping that it would counteract the insulin doses being pumped into his bloodstream by the tumor inside his pancreas.  He simply didn't want the prednisone and would fight me, even if scruffed, to keep me from giving it to him.  He also stopped eating altogether.

After writing to a friend and telling her the symptoms, she felt that maybe adding Carafate (a product much like Pepto-Bismol, that is used to sooth ulcers) to the regimen.  She also suggested offering him cream, which would help provide needed nutrition, as well as be easier on his stomach.  It would also help hide the taste of medication that I was giving him.  As an addition, she suggested that I get some chicken baby food (I found that Heinz makes a "Nature's Goodness" brand of 'Chicken and Broth' that is only finely-ground chicken and water) and give him that.

For about two weeks, this worked.  I mixed the meds and some honey into the cream and he would drink it out of a bowl.  I would then give him some of the chicken baby food (no, he didn't like it any more than most babies like it!).  Near the end, I found that I could put a little water in with the cream, then add the chicken baby food to that mixture and he would take it with no complaints.

All during this crisis, Smokey wavered back and forth, between seeming to get better and then getting worse.  About a week before he passed on, he was back at his old habit of stealing one of Ziggy's snacks!  I gave him two more, because this was the first solid food that I'd seen him eat in almost a month.  He ate the second snack, but only half of the third one (which Ziggy found and finished!), but that was a tremendous improvement over his previous actions!

However, two days later, he stopped walking.  The next morning, I took him in to get sub-Q fluids (the vet injects fluids under the outer skin, which is then slowly absorbed by the body) because he had again become dehydrated.  He refused to eat that morning, but by early afternoon he was willing to take in some cream and honey.

That night (Saturday, December 29, 2001), he began to shake.  I put some honey on