I'm so sorry, Pinky

Out of the blue, we lost one of our piggers on Monday.
On saturday evening Pinky was a bit quiet and on sunday it was apparent she didn't eat anything. So I phoned the vet and syringed her antibiotics (in case of an URI, which she had a month ago) and mashed pellets, and was told to see if it improved, which it also did for a while that evening. But the morning after she still hadn't eaten anything, so we took her to the vet. She got xrayed and the vet saw what he thought to be gas (a massive amount of it) and gave Pinky some paraffine and fiber paste to make it better and sent us home with instructions to come back in if it got worse. It did... She started having spasms and we brought her right back in. He tubed her and used a needle to try to get the gas out, but could only get fluid out. He asked if he could perform exploratory surgery on her to see if he could find anything. We agreed, because she didn't seem to be able to make it without.
Turns out it wasn't gas. It was all fluid. The gut was completely blocked, and the stomach so stretched you could see through. If they hadn't opened her up, she would have died shortly after any way. Which meant no matter what we did, she wouldn't have made it. Amazingly she woke up after the surgery, but she stopped breathing half an hour later. The only thing we could have done, was to insist on getting to see the vet on Sunday, but then we didn't know what we were dealing with. And at the time I thought "that's a lot of money, we'll keep an eye on her and call them if she gets worse". Which she didn't, on sunday... And in the end we paid more than three times that amount of money anyway, and it is so not an issue of cash. We have an emergency buffer. Sure, we could have gotten a lot of new guinea pigs for that money, but it would never be our Pinkst.
Still I feel we didn't do enough. I blame myself for not recognizing important signs and for not making the link between the anorexia/lack of poop and pee/lethargy. But I'm not a vet! I can recognize URI's and UTI's and abcesses, but it still doesn't make me a vet. But I feel so guilty, like I let her down. And not to mention heartbroken. People who don't have pets will never understand how they become a part of your family. It's physical pain every time I walk by the cage and don't see the white fluffball which was Pinky. Seeing only three piggies run to the food... There is something missing. I can't seem to grasp that she's gone, that I won't snuggle her again, that I wasn't able to save her.
And I know there'll be a day when the other piggies will be gone, and I can't stop thinking of it.
It was, of course, very traumatic on monday. If Pinky had died of old age I guess there wouldn't be so many what-ifs, but it's still so raw and so painful. Part of me wants to yell at myself because the logic says she was just an animal, but she was so much more.

But I will always remember her as our little Pinkst. She had a moehawk and you had to pat her "backwards" because her fur grew like that. She was the only one who (so far) got into the hammock alone, and loved sleeping there. She would never stay still on your lap, there was too much to explore. I will miss her so much.

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