For a while, she wasn’t eating or drinking…enough to  output some really weird sausage-linked/corkscrewy-looking droppings (warning: weird-looking poop, for those with a weak stomach). The tiny size comes from her not eating enough for a guinea pig and the sausage-linked part looks like she was dehydrated. I wound up having to force feed/hand feed her a lot and give her water through a 1cc syringe/holding a water bottle in front of her to get them to return to normal.

And the pellet slurry I made? I had a ridiculously hard time trying to get any of the solid pieces (which makes up most of the slurry) through the little opening, even if I cut off the tip. Most of what she was got was Oxbow Cavy Cuisine-flavored water, but none of the fibers. (Giving her water through a syringe–a different 1cc syringe from the slurry, is a little easier. It’s just a matter of getting the tip into her mouth.)

Luckily! I have no problems hand feeding her hay or giving her water straight from the bottle (hold the bottle in front of her so she drinks from it). Also I noticed that setting her on my bed on one of her folder cage blankets and hand her pieces of hay is a really effective way to get her to eat (after a few hand feedings, she started eating hay from the veggie basket on her own).

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She was living in her dining room sectioned off from the rest of the cage yesterday. I moved her to her old pet store cage and keep it on my bed when I’m not sleeping, mainly to make sure she was eating and drinking as usual. I found this has other benefits as well…

• It’s warmer where my bed is (in the center of the room, away from the window and door, where cold air leaks in–her cage is closer to the door).
• She seems to like having her cage higher up off the ground. I noticed she’s more willing to venture outside of her igloo more to get a drink or something to eat.

Buut as it turns out, I ended up not being able to tolerate the pet store cage as much as I did a year ago. Mainly because it’s really tiny. I could put her igloo in there (which traps the warm air) along with the sock filled with rice to keep her warm. But along with those two items, and her pellet bowl, her veggie bowl (to hold chopped veggies so they don’t get trampled on) and her veggie basket (mini hayrack  for the recovery cage), she won’t have room to turn around and go back into her igloo once she crawls out to eat or drink something.

So I separated the dining room from the big cage and temporarily turned it into a separate cage, which stays on my bed for most of the day, and goes in what’s left of the big cage when it’s bedtime (it gets covered with a blanket).

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Forgot to mention this here, but before the pre-surgery exam, the vet palpated Mocha (felt for any anomalies in her stomach) and noticed something hard in her belly. The thing turned out to be the uterus. (I got to see the uterus and ovaries when I went to pick up Mocha. The uterus did feel hard, like there was some growth inside it.)

I don’t know if it was pyometra, but the vet, after getting the results back from the lab about the urinary analysis, suspected it might be hyperplasia (where cells tend to multiply, which after seeing the uterus, makes a lot of sense now), which is common in senior pigs apparently. The uterus was about 1.5 inches, and along with the two 3/4 inch ovaries (both filled with cystic fluid), I can understand why her belly was so big. And I thought she was just overweight.

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Well, I was thinking about taking pictures of her new cage setup, but I pretty much had to take it apart almost to build a recovery cage for Mocha. There goes that plan. ><;;

Once we left the vet’s office, I gave her a piece of hay from her veggie basket,  which she nibbled. When we got home, I put her in her “recovery cage” (the 13×27“ dining room in her cage closed off from everything else) so she doesn’t open her stitches while running/trotting around her cage. Other than making sure she has everything she needs nearby (food, water, etc), the vet said also to hold her and cuddle her a lot, so she doesn’t become depressed (I guess from being in a small confined area?).

I read on Guinea Lynx that it’s not unusual for guineas to become quiet 24 hours after the surgery, but they also say to start making sure she’s eating as soon as possible, since guineas have digestive systems need to be constantly moving. She ate a little bit of everything I gave her at first, then when she got hungry, ate the rest of what was in her cage (romaine, a carrot, cilantro, green bell peppers, cranberries). When she went through a 6 hour period of eating nothing, I started force feeding her some pellet slurry (which was just Oxbow Cavy Cuisine soaked in water with chopped cilantro). When she got back into her cage, she ate some more pellets and drank some water.

Late at night, around 3, I could hear her wander out of her igloo to eat more (veggies, pellets and some hay). When I checked her cage in the morning, the 1/2 cup of veggies I put in her cage were GONE. :O Since she actually ate bell peppers, one of her least favorite foods, I guess it’s ok to assume she’ll be ok). I guess she still wants to eat…just not in large amounts yet, like before the surgery.

Also I noticed some pee stains on the white towels I lined her cage with, which made me happy, since yesterday, I wasn’t seeing any pee stains. o.o

Mocha’s surgery, that is.

The vet called at around 12:00 and said that Mocha was just waking up from the anesthesia. Which makes me really happy, because while they did a pre-surgery exam to make sure she’s fit for the anesthesia (checked kidney, liver, heart, etc), they couldn’t get a decent-sized blood sample from her, since she kept squirming around. After deciding that she didn’t want to cause her any more stress, the vet went ahead with the spay.

While Mocha is fine (and we will pick her up a little after 2pm), the uterus was really abnormal-looking, with weird blobular-looking things all over it. On both sides. O.o It also might have ruptured at one point (which I guess is where the bleeding came from?). But the vet wanted to send it to the lab to see what caused it and to see if it will cause any problems in the future for Mocha, and wanted to see what I thought about it, since it will be an extra $140. :O

I talked about it with my dad. And then my mom. And cried about it (if she gets some kind of cancer in the future, we would have to put her to sleep), since they didn’t think it was worth it (especially when I have no job). And after eating lunch, I thought about any cancerous things that might have caused it. She’s had Kaytee pellets growing up. They contain a preservative called ethoxyquin that’s known to cause cancer in some animals. As seeing as how she’s had them almost all her life, I was really surprised to see that it didn’t affect her at all.

Too late I guess.

(I did notice that she had been taking on a pear-shape since she was 3-4, almost like she was pregnant. Since she hadn’t come in contact with a boar since she was a wee one, I just assumed she was overweight, since she got little fiber and exercise. ;o;)

Uhh…well, it’s a good thing I switched her to Oxbow pellets when I heard about that.

As for the future, I guess the best I can do is make her remaining years as meaningful and happy as possible.

So that last upgrade was actually supposed to be the final upgrade with the upper deck and ramp. As it turns out, she only used the ramp for a couple days after it was added and refused to go back up again. This led to her not eating hay until I eventually came to terms with the fact that she might not use the ramp ever again.

If she were five years younger, I might be a bit more persistent (I did go through a bit of trouble to build the upper deck and ramp), but her advanced age might be keeping her from using it too much. Guinea pigs aren’t really climbers to begin with (but can handle gentle slopes), so it felt cruel to force her to climb up it and went back to something similar to this setup (took out the ramp since she wasn’t interested in it)…temporarily. o.o

I ended up clearing up space on the right side of the cage and expanded it one more grid, so instead of a 2×4 grid cage, it’s 2×5 grids. O.O Or in Guineapigcage measurements, 13 square feet. The upper deck (from this photo) was taken down and added to the grids to the length of the cage. The large 2×4 base is shifted over to the right and the upstairs 1×2 base now occupies the space on the left as a separate dining room/eating area. Since the eating area is sectioned off from the rest of the cage, it’s more of a 10 square foot cage like before. But once I’m able to adopt another peeg friend for Mocha, I won’t have to upgrade the cage anymore. (Getting new accessories on the other hand…)

I will post pics tomorrow.

I could see so many good things about this upgrade.

1. The  entrance to the dining room is lower than the temporary setup with the petstore cage base, so little jumping will be involved when heading to the dining room. If she’s too old for a ramp, do I really want her scaling a 5 inch wall? Nope. I did actually have a small upside down plastic container and her fiddlesticks as steps, but she never really used them… (when entering and exiting the dining room).
2. G-pigs tend to go to the bathroom where they eat (and sleep, but that’s another problem I need to figure out). Since the dining room has more absorbent material under the fleece (a 30×30“ cage blanket fromSewing 4 a Cause folded in half), it controls odor better.
3. All the hay can be contained in the dining room, which for some reason, doesn’t stick to the fleece as much as it does to the other fleece in the main part of the cage (the purple/blue polka dotted fleece). O.o

(Main reason was #1.)