Long version, also for posterity:
(My ferret's name is Lillith)
Surgery : July, 2019. Lillith ate a bit of my makeup bag without me noticing. An indeterminate amount of time later, she suddenly lost appetite and started puking up even water within the span of about six hours. Her poops were also super small and all she wanted to do was lay down. I took her to the vet in the morning where they did a barium test that showed that nothing was making it though the last part of her large intestine (although the blockage didn't show up on the X-ray because, as I found out later, it was fabric).
That night she had emergency surgery where they cut a line down her intestine to get the fabric out. The doctor sent her home with me the next day with instructions to have her eat wetted-down food.
A few days later, I noticed she was getting up less and seemed to be in pain when I picked her up. I took her back to the vet and they figured out that the stitching on her intestines had burst and there was fluid/food matter in her abdomen. They told me that it was either because I was feeding her too much or because I let her move around too much (neither of which they said anything about before they sent her home... first clue that this vet wasn't great).
She went back into surgery again and they did the resection. You can see the way it was done in the image below.
Before the surgery they told me they were going to sew her intestines back in a straight line. I never got them to tell me why they decided to do it this way instead...
After the surgery, they didn't let her eat or drink anything (only IVs for hydration) for a full two weeks while she was in the ICU.
Red lines: the edge of her intestines where they cut a section out. These are sewed closed.
Green circles: two new holes they opened up for food to pass through.
Diet: I started feeding Lillith and her brother raw soupies and slowly transitioned them to a raw diet (no whole prey) for about five months. I then took a break due to moving and being unable to find local meat sources, and got started back up about six months ago (now I do all my shopping online).
Bones: chicken wings, quail/rabbit (all bones with bigger rabbit bones smashed up)
Muscle meat: chicken gizzard, lamb/chicken/deer heart, the occasional beef or horse meat
Organs: lamb/chicken liver, lamb sweets bread?/kidney
I cut most things up so they're in long, thinish strips (except organs which I make into a soup) and follow the daily plan and amounts suggested on this forum.
Since feeding raw I've gotten AMAZING improvement in my babies' teeth and in fur texture. I feel like they also get a lot of their extra energy out eating (they almost never bite me when eating raw haha) and, most importantly, Lillith stops trying to chew all fabrics and other even slightly rubbery things around the house. This has always been a huge problem and one of the reasons I can't give her free range of the house... No matter how hard I ferret proof, she finds something new. It's like she has a sixth sense for finding chewy things! She will dig at places I've covered up cords or rubber stoppers on furniture until she gets at them and the only fabric off her menu is fleece. Anyway, chewing on bones daily almost completely resolved this behavior.
*Another kind poster also commented in here that she probably shouldn't even have bones in the first place because she has now has a weaker, more constricted patch in her intestines. I really wish I had come back here and checked that suggestion...Post surgery health: Ever since her surgery, Lillith has had bouts of random diarrhea and nausea.
Even on good days, her poops aren't as solid as her brother's, and they're almost always seedy. On bad days, they're super liquidy and she groans while going potty, obviously straining (oh my poor girl).
As for the nausea, every one to two weeks she'll have a couple of days where she keeps coughing and dry heaving, but rarely throws anything up.
I haven’t been able to connect these symptoms to any specific food, even when keeping a diary while feeding raw. And they don't seem to happen at the same time either.
When I took her to the vet that did her surgery, they told me that that's probably just how's she going to be from now on. I started taking her to a different vet (one with way more experience with ferrets) after I moved, and the doctor there thinks she has IBD. She has lots of bad bacteria in her stool and obviously bad digestion from the seediness and smell of her stool. She was on several of rounds of antibiotics last year, but they only improved her gut health while she was taking them and the bad bacteria came right back after each round ended.
Current health crises: Last week, a few days after Lillith finished a round of antibiotics and was starting to get her watery stools back, she woke up and wasn’t very interested in breakfast. At first I thought it was because her tummy wasn't feeling good, but throughout the day she ate very little and started getting more and more lethargic. Then (of course, right around the time the vet closed) she got the, "I don't feel good," squinty eyes, started laying down in a straight line on the floor, and refused to even drink water.
I took her to the emergency vet to get her an X-ray and it showed that she had a mass in her abdomen that looked like bones. The emergency doctor told me that feeding raw had caused her to get a blockage and arranged for her to get transferred to the ferret vet in the morning.
At the ferret vet, they decided to do a barium test before surgery because Lillith was still passing watery stool and the pieces of bone in her intestines looked too small (1 to 1.5mm) for her not to be able to pass. The test revealed that she was still able to get stuff past the "blockage," and brought up the possibility of her digestion having just gotten really bad, really quickly and not allowing her to pass the bone.
I ended up taking her home without doing a surgery. She started back up on more antibiotics the next day and, to my great relief, was pretty much back to normal within a day. As for food, I freaked out about her getting a blockage because I had been giving her raw meaty bones and tried to give her mushy kibble... but she refused it so I made raw soup.
She was passing small (1mm) bone fragments, so I assumed we were in the clear, but I took her back to the vet on the third day anyway. Aaand the bone was still there, albeit lessened a bit.
The doctor now thinks that her intestines have healed so there is a pocket in them (see the image below) where bones are building up. The reason she felt unwell was probably because the pocket got too full and the pressure was hurting her...
Orange cross: the part of her intestines that used to have a hole in it, but seems to have fused close, creating a "pocket" in her intestines.
Blue dots: bone fragments (1 to 1.5mm) building up in the "pocket."
In conclusion: I've put Lillith back on dry kibble for now. The doctor is suggesting we wait and see how long it takes the pocket in her intestines to empty out and decided what to do if it doesn't empty out. I'm thinking that the secret to the bad bacteria in her gut is the stagnant material in the pocket... although she may really just have IBD. And none of this seems like it would have anything to do with her periodic nausea...
Also, unfortunately, being on kibble has led her back to chewing on everything in sight, and I'm pretty scared that she'll get another blockage.
I'd like to somehow get her on a raw diet that doesn't have bone fragments in it so she can at least chew on the muscle meat. However, I need to do more research about bone-in grinds and/or the viability of long term substitution of actual bones for bone meal. If anyone has some insight they'd like to share here, that'd be awesome!
Also, also, I'm a little pissed at the emergency vet that immediately assumed eating bones = intestinal blockage. I couldn't find anything about this on these forums, but does anyone know if that's even possible?
