In summer of 1998 I saw a beautiful half-grown ferret for sale in a pet store. She'd been there for months and no one had wanted her. I did. Lizzie was an albino, and so it was always hard to take good pictures of her. Usually her eyes reflected so much light that the rest of her face and its expressions weren't noticeable, and it was a shame because she had an amazingly expressive face. She was very affectionate with other ferrets and prefered to sleep with them. Sometimes I called her a Lizzie-pig, because she had a pink piggy nose. Like Lucy, she got into everything, and sometimes she was a white trash ferret.

Lizzie had adrenal surgery once when she was four. In January of 2004, she showed symptoms again and she went back for another round of surgery in February. Unfortunately, it turned out that there had been some tiny bit of the original gland left behind in the first surgery (it was the right adrenal, and nestled right against her liver and vena cava). So she went on Lupron, and when her recovery seemed slow she got predinisone to try to ease the shock from the loss of the remaining gland. Eventually the prednisone trigered diabetes, as we discovered at the end of April, 2004.

Ferret metabolism makes diabetes hard to treat. Insulin can be injected but it gets processed and out of the bloodstream too fast to really control the disease. For a while Lizzie seemed to improve, but then we had our trouble with Oscar. Lizzie died July 5, 2004. She outlived Oscar by three weeks.

1998 - July 5, 2004