So…the blood in urine? The vet said there was no evidence of bacteria in the urine, so it’s not a bladder infection or anything like that. She thinks it might be some problem with the uterus and wants to have Mocha spayed (guinea pigs don’t have periods) before it gets worse.

So yeah. I knew there was some risk of guinea pigs going under surgery (usually with them not waking up from the anesthesia or the surgery itself). The risks tend to be minimized if the vet is very experienced with neuters (I found out through Guinealynx that Mocha’s vet has done hundreds of g-pig neuters and read an account of a boar recovering from his neuter from the same vet). So that puts my mind at ease a little and I have a pretty good idea of what to expect post-op (of course, the boar was also much younger than Mocha when he had his surgery, but I also read about other senior* pigs undergoing surgery and doing well).

 *Guinea pigs can live for about 5-7 years, even more. Mocha is 7 now.

So…yeah…I leave these links.

• Surgery
• Snowflake’s Spay
• Post Operative Care
• Pain (can also happen after a surgery and should be reported to your vet)

Mocha has a checkup appointment on Friday, but I will see if I can move it to tomorrow, since I noticed today that she was peeing blood. O.O;; Gut feeling tells me it’s UTI, but it could also be some other problems (reproductive problems or bladder stones). My mom at first suspected that she might have had a cut in her mouth, but I had her at the kitchen table on fleece while I was doing the dishes. I kept checking on her occasionally and found a fresh spot of blood on the fleece right under her bottom.

On the upside, she is still eating. She inhaled her dinner and finished off some celery leaves while we were having dinner. And after I noticed she wasn’t really interested in using her upstairs area, I put her hay rack on the bottom level. She munched away happily. I feel like a horrible owner. ;o;

Remember this? Yeah, Mocha’s musician status has been upgraded in Dreamland apparently when I put a toy keyboard in her cage.

I fell asleep and when I woke up partially, I could hear her playing what sounded like video game music (from some JRPG) on the keyboard and hitting some hay stems on her fiddlesticks like drums. O.O;; I didn’t think much of it (other than I was kind of surprised at how good she was with the keyboard–kinda expected her to use like a toddler would and only hit random keys to hear the sounds they make…).

I woke up again and found that it wasn’t Mocha on a keyboard playing the music, but my mom on the piano. I thought it was a silly dream and decided to tell Funkymonk about it (who was also at our house at the same time…I was kinda weirded out that I fell asleep while he was over). Except I couldn’t get it out, like I had lost my voice. Then I woke up again (for real this time). The piano playing was actually W88.

–

In other news, I’ve completed the final upgrade to her cage.  The ramp has a permanent cover, which seems to make her feel safer when going up and down it (also almost found out the hard way that she has no problems jumping from the top of the ramp to the bottom level, which is about a foot drop ). The white felt-like material has been replaced with black rubber shelf liner, which keeps her from slipping (one reason why she was afraid using it).

The upper deck on the right is a hayloft, which has her food bowls and hay. Each level gets a water bottle. The cat hat was in there for Thanksgiving (to make her feel less alone since we were gone for most of the day, my dad suggested I put something in there that smelled like me).

To get her used to the ramp, I set up her playtime/”floortime” area with the ramp flat on the floor as a tunnel. I lured her through both ways with pieces of parsley, just for her to get a feel of it (since her first experience with the felt material didn’t go so well). I then turned over the base from her old pet store cage (the medium-sized Super Pet cage) and propped up the ramp on the edge of that, so it slopes a little, enough for it to look safe, but still at a slope, so she could be reassured that she wouldn’t slide. Getting her up the ramp was easier than getting her down it, but once again, it wasn’t very steep, so it didn’t take long. She even went up the ramp by herself without me holding out any parsley.

When it was time to go back her cage, I put everything back in its place, including the ramp. Her hay, food bowls and one of the water bottles went upstairs. Since it was also dinner time for her, I brought her a salad and put that upstairs, sometimes throwing pieces of it down the ramp. She kept running back and forth from the bottom of the ramp to the middle of the cage where she could smell the food. It seemed like she was really tempted to go up it, but something was preventing her. o.o Eventually (while I was looking around my room for some leftover coroplast or something to make the ramp less steep) she thought ‘oh screw it’, and crawled up, eating the veggies along the way.

Getting her to go down the ramp also took a bit of time, but the call of parsley overcame her fear.

You heard it here first, folks. The power of food defeats the power of fear. >:o (An old guinea pig saying.)

And now that It Has Begun (officially, in the US), I guess I must begin Christmas shawpping now.