I recently found a thing online called fatty pea eye and my guinea pig kinda looks like she ay have it so I was interested if anyone can tell me if she has healthy eyes or something.
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Hi!
Take a deep breath, your piggy hasn't got it! The eye is looking perfectly normal. In 'pea eye' cases the lower back end of the lid draws down and the pink conjunctiva becomes visible. It is generally much more common in older piggies.
This is my Tesni, who had it in her old age:
However, please see a vet promptly if one of the eyes is either drawn in or bulging noticeably!
Please be aware that if you have anxiety issues, online research is only going to fuel your fears and can lead to pet anxiety where fretting takes over any enjoyment of your pets and leads to obsessive health checking at the cost of everything else. The danger to fall into this trap is even greater in the current situation when you are already stressed out.
Be aware that when doing any online health research you have to make always allowance for several facts:
- You inevitably get all the horror stories and all the stories where traumatised newly bereaved owners have seized on one isolated symptom and put two and two together with rather disastrous results, without any medical grounding. They are then keen to spread their own gospel to 'warn' others. We see the latter on here fairly regularly, too.
- You get all the miracle cures that usually fail to work out in real life but are handed on by eager owners without the necessary medical backgound or practical personal experience.
- Then there are the fads were a certain issue is drifting into wider conscience and is applied to everything, whether appropriate or not. We have had it with diabetes for several years (yes, guinea pigs can have diabetes but it is not very common) and lately with head tilts - it can be a secondary issue to blindness but more commonly it is caused by other causes and needs to always be seen by a vet promptly!
- You also get the eager home grown 'researchers' and self-declared 'health experts' who are keen to show off their knowledge and happily play one upmanship with their fellow posters to throw ever more exotic and dire diagnoses into the ring for their own gratification and self-esteem and not for the poster's benefit.
This is the main reason why we have introduced a signature badge for experienced members whose sound medical knowledge and ethics we fully trust and why we are asking all other members to please stick to cases where they have personal experience with exactly the same issue or otherwise to please keep it to messages of support. Care section threads are also not there to showcase your own piggies unless they illustrate the exact issue of the poster.
- What you NEVER get online is the vast majority of perfectly problem-free and undramatic recoveries; these are taken for granted and are not considered worth reporting, so you always have automatically compensate for that.
If you have any serious health concerns over your piggies, please have your piggies health checked by a vet once every 6 or 12 months. PLEASE stay off any online research, urine tests and any more frequent helath checks than the normal once weekly weigh-in and body once-over unless something is really wrong.
Illness is never like 'this one symptom fits; therefore my piggy must have the illness'. Diagnosing is MUCH more complex than that, as any vet can tell you!
If you catch yourself worrying constantly about your guinea pigs' health, please seek help from a mental health support group so you can get back to enjoying your healthy pets instead of constantly fretting; there is support and there are free mental exercises out there to help you. Keep in mind that your pets will be much happier too if they are not at the receiving end of your fretting all the time. They'd rather have a owner who enjoys them for what they are!