Lump Nikki has a lump

Thank you both very much.

I have a question. Nikki's surgery is on Wednesday, however, I'm dropping her off at the vet tomorrow afternoon because of the distance. Can I feed her veggies before she goes to the vet? (I'm not sure if guinea pigs need to fast like other animals do before surgery. I'm assuming not, but I wanted to make sure.)

Guinea pigs can't vomit, so they don't need to be fasted for surgery. In fact, fasting can do a lot of harm if they go into GI stasis.

Okay. Thanks! I was thinking it'd do more harm than good but I wanted to be safe and ask anyways.

You should stop feeding her a couple of hours before the surgery, which isn't necessarily when you drop her off at the vet. I'd find out what time the surgery is scheduled, and time it to stop two hours before then.
@pigmommy89 is correct that pigs can't vomit, and therefore don't need to fast for hours before surgery. But they do usually have a lot of gunk in their mouths, and one very good exotic vet that I know of prefers to give them some time for the mouth to clear.

They may not vomit but they do regurgitate their food and if they do whilst under it is not good! I've seen this first hand whilst working in a vets. You should check with your vet


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There seems to be general agreement on vet sites that they can't regurgitate. If they've been fed very shortly before anesthesia, they may have a little food in their esophagus. If they have liquid contents in their stomachs when anesthetized, and if their heads are not maintained in a slightly elevated position, the stomach contents can come back up. But rodents in general lack the strength in the diaphragm to actually vomit.

Here are some links:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smar...throw-up-in-case-you-were-wondering-25707720/
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0060537
https://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/12/rodent-vomiting
https://books.google.com/books?id=s...onepage&q=can guinea pigs regurgitate&f=false

Since I dropped her off tonight (surgery is tomorrow morning) I went ahead and fed her as usual.

I have a temporary small cage with white towels set up for her to go in when she comes home. How long should I keep her in there?

She'll need to be kept separated from her cage mate for about a week. The best thing to do is to confine her in one end of the big cage, and gradually increase her space by moving the grids.

You'll have to do re-introductions when you get ready to put them back together.

Thank you.

The vet called this morning and said she amazingly passed the stone on her own, so he didn't need to surgically remove it. He took three more x-rays and sure enough, it's not there anymore. He had already sedated her when he realized the stone was gone. How should I care for her now? Should her "post-op" care still be the same?

No, she doesn't need any post-op care. Just put her back in the cage, and aim for a diet that's about .4% calcium.

Nikki had more bloody discharge and is once again squeaking when she pees. I'm guessing that either the stone was "hiding" somewhere it couldn't be seen on the three x-rays the vet took the morning of her surgery, or she already has another one. I'm guessing it's the former because she came home in the same mood she was in before I dropped her off. If anything, she's gotten worse and I've been bit several times (hard). I had a bad feeling when I picked her up from the vet and I should've listened to it, but I figured I was just crazy paranoid. Ugh. Off to the vet again we go...

I'm starting to feel hopeless. She hasn't formed another stone and now we can't figure out what's wrong with her. She's still having bloody discharge on and off and occasionally (not always) shrieks in pain when she pees. The vet did an ultrasound on her and nothing showed up on there either. The vet doesn't know what's wrong with her because nothing will show up. We're waiting on the results of a urine test now and are going to try more (different) meds to see if that helps any... I feel so bad for her because she's been irritable, angry and in pain almost 24/7 for months now. She's always biting and tearing at her fleece, viciously chewing on the bars of her cage, biting me and anyone else who touches her, and any time you do touch her she makes frustrated noises and rumbles and shrieks. Pain meds do not help her at all. Over the last month or so she's gone from just over 2 pounds to 1 pound and 12 ounces. She hasn't lost her appetite at all so I don't know how or why she's lost weight because she's still eating as usual. But the only time she seems happy is when she is eating and that is not an exaggeration in the slightest. I hate seeing her like this. The vet bills are adding up and getting very expensive and it is a 4 hour round trip each time we go and it's frustrating that despite everything I've been doing I can't help her. I've been to 4 vets before even finding someone who was knowledgable and even wanted to treat her (all exotic vets), the vet I've been going to is the one who found the stone she had and he is a good doctor that I trust but even he can't figure this out. I don't know what to do.

Maybe ask another vet for an opinion?

The loss of weight while eating could suggest an infection. Maybe uterine? Does she have any unusual odor when you see the bloody discharge?

I've been to 4 vets. I can try to find another but it's getting hard to find any exotic vets because of the area I live in. I've been to all of the local ones and I've tried to find others through online searching but they're all a very long drive away from me.

There's been no odor. The vet mentioned it might be some sort of reproductive infection or disease but I don't know how that's diagnosed. He's done 4 x-rays, an ultrasound and a urine test that we're waiting on.

(broken link removed)

To summarize Nikki's calcium issues and get this thread up to date:
She started producing discharge, sometimes bloody, sometimes white. She had formed a stone, and passed it before surgery. Afterwards, she started producing discharge again -- but another stone hasn't formed (the vet checked multiple times). She lost weight after passing the stone, but has since gained it back and is just an ounce or two under the heaviest she's ever been. However, despite appearing and behaving otherwise healthy, she's still forming occasional white discharge and leaving white marks on the fleece.

Her diet is just about as low calcium as I can make it:
Filtered water.
1/8 of a cup of the new Oxbow Essentials formula.
Unlimited SPS 3rd cutting timothy hay (she won't eat the 2nd cut).
1 cup of veggies: green leaf lettuce, 1/8 of a green bell pepper, and one baby carrot. Every 7 days, she gets a small piece of fruit in place of the carrot.

I'm guessing her calcium issues are genetic. That's what the vet thinks, after reviewing her diet and water source with me. He ran some tests to see if the discharge was caused by something other than calcium-issues (urinary, reproductive, etc) and found nothing. He recommended I give her 1/16 of a teaspoon of potassium citrate twice a day, but after doing a little bit of research it seems like there's no solid evidence to prove that it helps prevent stones in guinea pigs. Nikki hates the stuff. She wouldn't even touch her food whenever I tried sprinkling it on or mushing it in with her veggies. I tried syringe feeding it to her by mixing it with water, but both times she fought me like crazy (I had to have someone else hold her for me to even get any of it in her mouth) and shrieked. I feel like it put wayyy too much stress on her to do it twice a day, every day, especially at her age (5.5 years) so I stopped giving it to her. Was this the right thing to do?

Thank you for the baby food suggestion! I'll be doing it that way from now on. I tried it out tonight and it went well. Nikki liked it so much that she chewed on the syringe after it was gone because she wanted more.

Great news that you've had success using the baby food. I hope you see good results using this method. It will be interesting to see how everything works out.

Thanks. In a couple of weeks I'll report if the potassium citrate has made any positive changes (I sure hope so).

So, I tried the potassium citrate for a while and it made zero difference in the amount of calcium spots Nikki produced. I eventually stopped feeding it to her as the baby food was giving her runny poops, so everything considered, it was just a hassle and caused more problems than it solved.

I have, however, recently begun giving Nikki a vitamin C supplement (25 mg a day) in order to help her gain and maintain weight as she's begun to have issues in that regard as she gets older (she's turning 6 this year). Not only has the vitamin C helped her gain and keep the weight on, it has interestingly decreased the amount of calcium spots she's producing. The only article I could find regarding the correlation between vitamin C and calcium was this one:
https://www.wisegeek.org/what-is-the-connection-between-vitamin-c-and-calcium.htm
Which states:
"Vitamin C can positively effect the way calcium is metabolized in the body. For many people who take calcium supplements, overload is a concern. Significant amounts of vitamin C intake can help protect against the calcification of soft tissue and add to the solubility of calcium."

Just thought I'd put this out there.