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Sick How to help my guinea pig to eat on her own?

Jenn1372

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So I took my daughter's guinea pig to the emergency vet yesterday. She wasn't eating, drinking very little and had decreased urine and poo output. What urine she did have was bloody.They did xrays and her stomach was filled with gas and there was bacteria and crystals in her urine. She was rehydrated and given a injection of a pro-motility drug. I was sent home with Baytril and Metacam.

The vet said I should see improvement today. She is peeing but only pooped once. She won't eat or drink but I am giving her Critical Care and water with a syringe. What else I can I get to tempt her to eat? Any special hay or veggies that guinea pigs love? Is there a trick to getting her to take the syringe better? I have only been able to get 5 ml of Critical Care in her and 3 ml of water.
 

Magewrite

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My guinea pig had a different problem, but it has the same result: not pooping and hourly critical care needed. At first, she fought and wouldn't eat much, and we guessed that this was because she hadn't eaten in too long. Keep trying, and hopefully she will pick up more food as she feels better. It's kind of like a human: you eat too much after starving and it makes you sick. As for other foods, she may enjoy her normal veggies (ours love dandalion greens and spinach) or an eighth of an orange (which will increase her vitamin C intake and help her health, too), but on the flip side, she may not be feeling up to eating at all.
Good luck, and I hope your piggie feels better soon!

Also, I plan on posting a tutorial on how to hand-feed a guinea pig, so I'll post a link here when I get it up, in case that would help.
 

bpatters

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See https://www.guinealynx.info/handfeeding.html. It's called force feeding for a reason, and you'll have to make her eat. Guinea pigs can go downhill and die very quickly if food isn't kept moving through their gut.

Read that over, and if you have questions, post back here. I'll keep an eye on this thread for a while.
 

Jenn1372

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So I took my pig back to the vet today because she still wasn't pooping. ( of course she starts pooping while we are there.) The vet mentioned the possibility of a bladder stone, the bladder was covered by her other organs so they couldn't tell by xrays at emergency vet. We are going to do a ultrasound to confirm and she will need surgery if she has one. Anyone have bladder stone surgery done on their pig? My vet didn't give me a positive feedback about it and reading about it on the internet confirms it
How expensive is it? Did your pig get stones again and how soon? And how is the recovery?
 

bpatters

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Other organs covering the bladder will not keep a vet from being able to see bladder stones unless those organs are bones. Sometimes a stone will hide behind a bone and not be visible, but if they take both a side and top/bottom view, they'll be able to see it. Any vet telling you that the other organs will block the view of a stone should be avoided like the plague.

One of mine had a stone removed just before Christmas, and has done fine since then. A cystotomy is not a terribly bad surgery for a guinea pig if done by a competent surgeon. Just don't use the one who says the stone is hiding behind internal organs.
 
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