Hi
fully with
@Piggies&buns
Your daily weight monitoring on your normal kitchen scales first thing in the morning for best day to day comparison and to allow you to plan out the feeding support for the coming 24 hours according to it and your continuing feeding support that is tailored to what the scales tell you are crucial in helping to get your piggies through the crisis.
Keep in mind that over three quarters of what a guinea pig eats in a day should be hay/fresh grass (veg and pellets
together only replace the supplementary role that wild forage used to have) and that you can never monitor its intake just by eye, your support feeding care of replacing the all important grass fibre for both the gut and dental growth is crucial and may need much larger amounts than you think - ideally 60-90 ml but in a very poorly, very weak piggy you aim for 40 ml in 24 hours just to just keep them alive. How much and how often you need to feed in a session depend both your weigh-in and how much your piggy is able to process in one go.
Our very practical Care links at the end of the previous posts contain all the necessary in-depth information, step-by-step advice and the little how-to tips that enable you to do your very best and have as much of a chance in winning the battle as possible. We have included emergency improvisation advice in the guides to make as much use of what you have at home or quickly available and can step in asap in any emergency.
Your home feeding care is just as important as any medication because the medication can only get to work if your piggy still has the strength to fight.
Sadly there is no ideal medication for guinea pigs and other rodents with their very long, narrow gut; any major digestive upsets are always very much a battle for life. Please take the time to read our Care guide links because you will find that they answer all the little questions that we cannot answer in every single post, seeing that we are all doing this for free in our own free time. We have put 15 years of practical forum experience with all sorts of questions around support care and our own owner experience, which is reaching back half a century in some cases, into those guides and have made them as easy to follow for anybody, however inexperienced.
The poo output (or lack of it) is always running at least one day behind the intake. With a sluggish gut, this can take even longer. Think of a conveyor belt. You will see a marked gap and then usually some very funny and small poos before your full feeding support is kicking in 1-2 days later. If you are not feeding enough, then that is also reflected but you lose a crucial day or two of adjusting your support help level if you only go by the poo output. Weighing is like instant communication on Earth while care via poo monitoring has the time lag of somebody having an emergency on an outer planet.
This guide here is our new updated support care guide, which you may find the best to follow:
All About Syringe Feeding and Medicating Guinea Pigs with Videos and Pictures
This guide here looks specifically at care needs during major digestive illnesses; we have all lumped them together because they can sometimes mix and the medication and care needs are basically the same.
Digestive Disorders: Not Eating - Diarrhea - Bloat - GI Stasis (No Gut Movement)
I hope that this helps you? I am keeping my fingers very firmly crossed for you!
