I was watching this video and I found it so cute the way the ferret was so deeply asleep. It reminded me of Mash, our first ferret, who used to sleep so soundly that I could dangle her upside down and she wouldn’t wake up. But that was before we had our first insulinoma experience!

CJ was the first to get the disease and that made me realise how woefully unprepared we would have been with Mash had she been going through an insulinoma coma, and then I started thinking about how to identify between the two.

Muis had the worst case of insulinoma coma and it was sheer luck that I twigged what was going on with her. She never had that “glazed, far off” expression that CJ had but I felt that she wasn’t quite right because there was a flash of odd behaviour the month before.

She seemed to have a far away look when she was looking out of the chest of drawers but the minute I brought their smoothy into the bedroom, she shot out of the drawer and licked up the smoothy with pure gusto.

I was a little concerned by that flash so took her to my vet who checked her out. She thought that since Muis was fine BEFORE she had her smoothy, rather than afterwards, it couldn’t have been due to insulinoma.

A few weeks later I had looked in the drawer to check on her – it was really early in the morning, around 3am – and saw her sleeping peacefully. When I checked on her again when I got up at 6, I saw that her position was just the same as it had been 3 hours earlier and that made warning signals go off in my brain.

I took her out of the drawer and she was like a limp rag and despite my stroking her and kissing her, she didn’t wake up at all and I knew she was in a coma.

We got the honey and smeared some on her gums and it seemed to take forever for her to wake up, but wake up she did and she came out of the cat carrier and toddled down the corridor to our bedroom as if nothing had happened.

I don’t even want to think what might have happened had I not checked on her earlier and realised she hadn’t moved all that time. Imagine if I’d just seen her at 6, then got ready and left the house for the whole day. I reckon she would have just slipped away in her coma and I would have come home to find a dead ferret in the drawer :(

So – to all you new ferret owners out there, I would urge you to make sure that your ferret really IS having a deep sleep and isn’t in a coma. How you check is to see if your ferret will open its eyes by itself and yes, even look a little annoyed that you woke him up. If that doesn’t happen, despite all your prodding, then grab some honey and rub it on its gums. Once your ferret wakes up, get him down to the vet pronto!

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Filed under: Ferret Health • Ferret Illnesses • Insulinoma in Ferrets

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