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Healing vibes for Hazelnut

Pound Shilling & Pig

Pound Shilling & Pig

Adult Guinea Pig
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Aug 22, 2012
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Location
shropshire
My beautiful piggy Hazelnut is not well. She has been losing a little bit of weight and earlier in the week I made a vet appointment for Friday (yesterday).
On exam the vet could find nothing wrong other than her guts were very empty, not a surprise as yesterday morning she had little interest in breakfast veg or hay and most likely had eaten little overnight. Her chest is fine, her teeth are fine, she has no abdominal lumps or swellings or bloat. So for now she is on metacam and syringe feeding and if no improvement has to go back next week for xrays and scan.
She really has very little interest in food, all she has eaten today by herself is a little bit of cucumber a celery leaf and a couple of dandelion leaves. She seems to like the syringe food but takes a long time to swallow it so I can not get much in at a time. I suspect it might be painful for her to swallow. Also today I have noticed, if I put my face close to hers, I can smell that old dish cloth smell associated with oral thrush. So now I am thinking that might be the problem. Does anyone have any experience of this? Obviously she will be going back to the vets and I will take it up with them but wondered if anyone has had this issue and importantly what they found there pig could eat?
Also if it is oral thrush where do they get it from? And is it likely to be secondary to something else weakening their immune system?
I have a bad feeling about it and am really worried she is not going to pull through even though she still looks quite bright.

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Pound Shilling & Pig said:
My beautiful piggy Hazelnut is not well. She has been losing a little bit of weight and earlier in the week I made a vet appointment for Friday (yesterday).
On exam the vet could find nothing wrong other than her guts were very empty, not a surprise as yesterday morning she had little interest in breakfast veg or hay and most likely had eaten little overnight. Her chest is fine, her teeth are fine, she has no abdominal lumps or swellings or bloat. So for now she is on metacam and syringe feeding and if no improvement has to go back next week for xrays and scan.
She really has very little interest in food, all she has eaten today by herself is a little bit of cucumber a celery leaf and a couple of dandelion leaves. She seems to like the syringe food but takes a long time to swallow it so I can not get much in at a time. I suspect it might be painful for her to swallow. Also today I have noticed, if I put my face close to hers, I can smell that old dish cloth smell associated with oral thrush. So now I am thinking that might be the problem. Does anyone have any experience of this? Obviously she will be going back to the vets and I will take it up with them but wondered if anyone has had this issue and importantly what they found there pig could eat?
Also if it is oral thrush where do they get it from? And is it likely to be secondary to something else weakening their immune system?
I have a bad feeling about it and am really worried she is not going to pull through even though she still looks quite bright.

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Mystery weight loss/loss of appetite is my least favourite symptom, as so many different and somewhat unusual things can be behind it. :(

Fingers very firmly crossed for Hazelnut!
 
Wiebke said:
Mystery weight loss/loss of appetite is my least favourite symptom, as so many different and somewhat unusual things can be behind it. :(

Fingers very firmly crossed for Hazelnut!
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Thankyou. I hate it too. She is about 5 so realistically old enough for any number of things to be going wrong.
 
Pound Shilling & Pig said:
Thankyou. I hate it too. She is about 5 so realistically old enough for any number of things to be going wrong.
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Have you checked the throat or back of the throat as I have had a couple of time a throat infection or a swelling at the back that didn't show beind refusal to eat. It's not an area that it generally checked - but I have also had a very badly bloated stomach (but normal gut) once causing the same vague symptoms. :(
 
Wiebke said:
Have you checked the throat or back of the throat as I have had a couple of time a throat infection or a swelling at the back that didn't show beind refusal to eat. It's not an area that it generally checked - but I have also had a very badly bloated stomach (but normal gut) once causing the same vague symptoms. :(
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The vet spent a long time checking her teeth but I dont know how much attention she paid to her mouth. Un fortunately the piggy savvy vet I used to see has left the practice and while the vet I saw is quite good she lacks experience in some areas of piggy health.
I am suspicious that the problem might well be with her throat.
Were the throat infections you've experienced fungal or bacterial? And did they have a good outcome?
 
Pound Shilling & Pig said:
The vet spent a long time checking her teeth but I dont know how much attention she paid to her mouth. Un fortunately the piggy savvy vet I used to see has left the practice and while the vet I saw is quite good she lacks experience in some areas of piggy health.
I am suspicious that the problem might well be with her throat.
Were the throat infections you've experienced fungal or bacterial? And did they have a good outcome?
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Sadly both issues were picked up on too late. :(

Bryn's deterioraton happened over a weekend; by the time I got an antibiotic prescribed, it was too late. The esophagus swelled completely closed that same evening. He was 6 years and getting rather frail by then but this one of those issues that blew up out of the blue and came very much from a blind spot.

Papi I took to the out of hours vets for pts when her loss of appetite morphed into increasing salivating (meaning she had a blockage somewhere); it happened only a couple of days after I had to pts her old husboar Maelog for a blockage in the gut. It took me a good 20 minutes to persuade the vet to please take a look at her mouth and throat after he wanted to send me home with her with some oral baytril. He did come back visibly shaken after finding a large lump right at the back of the mouth that was not really noticeable from the outside; we went ahead with not waking her up from her anaesthesia as the kindest thing. She was just short of her 4th birthday.

Just 6 weeks later I lost my big fluffball Angharad at just 2 years when she lost the ability to swallow and any syringe feed came straight back out again. At least this time I was already at the out-of-hours vets with her when she started salivating... :(

It was a weird coincidence with three different fatal blockages in less than two months and it did shake me quite a bit.
 
Wiebke said:
Mystery weight loss/loss of appetite is my least favourite symptom, as so many different and somewhat unusual things can be behind it. :(

Fingers very firmly crossed for Hazelnut!
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可能是肿瘤
 
@Wiebke I am sorry for your losses. As yet Hazelnut is not salivating nor allowing syringe food to simply drool out, I have had those experiences before with pigs suffering blocked gall bladders (diagnosed on pm) but i agree it must be her throat or partial blockage somewhere. (Droppings, albeit not many are still coming out). I lost King Edward's friend Athelstan to a mass at the back of his tongue a few months ago, which the vet discovered because I pointed out that the front of his tongue looked sore.
I am about to get up and see how she is, am really hoping she has been eating overnight
 
My late Muffin had throat infections during his middle ages. First the vet diagnosed it to be fungal. We treated it, it went away, a few month later it started again ... and again. In the end it was a long treatment with baytril that put an end to it. But his only symptoms were coughing. He was eating just fine all of the time.
My vet prescribed this as supportive medication. It seem to help a bit, but I don't know if it's available in the UK.
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I hope the pain medication helps till you can see the vet again.
 
Sending lots of healing vibes to Hazel, hope you find out what the problem is and you could get it treated. That dishcloth smell is strongly associated with oral thrus. I got it once after a bout of bronchitis and was prescribed Nystatin
 
I've had three piggies, over the years, with these symptoms. Two have been treated successfully with a combination of itrafungol and zithromax and the more recent one didn't respond to the meds at all and was put to sleep. Kim wondered if she had end stage kidney disease, as the mouth can look very similar to oral thrush with that. For the two that recovered, it was a quite a slow recovery, but they got there in the end. However, I have had piggies struggling to swallow, if the teeth are overgrown at the very back and once they have been filed to the correct length they have been fine. They too have had that wet dishcloth smell, due to food getting impacted into the mouth due to the overgrown teeth.
 
furryfriends (TEAS) said:
I've had three piggies, over the years, with these symptoms. Two have been treated successfully with a combination of itrafungol and zithromax and the more recent one didn't respond to the meds at all and was put to sleep. Kim wondered if she had end stage kidney disease, as the mouth can look very similar to oral thrush with that. For the two that recovered, it was a quite a slow recovery, but they got there in the end. However, I have had piggies struggling to swallow, if the teeth are overgrown at the very back and once they have been filed to the correct length they have been fine. They too have had that wet dishcloth smell, due to food getting impacted into the mouth due to the overgrown teeth.
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Thankyou, this is encouraging. She is still bright this morning. She doesn't cough or drool or anything like that, just doesn't want to eat. On Friday when she was interested in the grass I offered her, as she ate it, she kept throwing her head up and down, kinda like horses do. I showed a video to the vet.
This morning she has nibbled a few weeds I offered and a tiny bit of graze-on. Basically she will try something she has not had for a while but quickly lose interest. Were there any foods you found your pigs were willing to eat?
 
Pound Shilling & Pig said:
Thankyou, this is encouraging. She is still bright this morning. She doesn't cough or drool or anything like that, just doesn't want to eat. On Friday when she was interested in the grass I offered her, as she ate it, she kept throwing her head up and down, kinda like horses do. I showed a video to the vet.
This morning she has nibbled a few weeds I offered and a tiny bit of graze-on. Basically she will try something she has not had for a while but quickly lose interest. Were there any foods you found your pigs were willing to eat?
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I found grass or herbs were the foods they were most likely to try. However, syringe feeding was needed for a couple of weeks and it was a little and often regime, as they couldn’t take much in one go. Very slowly things began to steadily improve xx
 
Sadly Hazelnut has now crossed the 🌈 bridge 😭😭😭
This morning she had started to drool and get bloaty and was unable to swallow her meds. So I took her to have her pts.
I asked the vet if once that was done she could examine her mouth and throat. The vet did and said there was no swelling or mass or obvious infection but did say her jaw was very loose and could be moved much more from side to side than should be possible, like you would expect with a dislocation or break in the socket but said that would be an extremely unusual injury for a piggy and didn't know how it could happen. So it is possible she was born with some malformity which only became a problem with the ware and tear of aging. The vet who examined her on Friday thought she reacted in a way that suggested she may have had pain in her neck or that it may have just been a fear reaction. So I guess that fits with pain in her jaw. Either way, there is nothing that could have been done for her.
Since coming home I have wondered if she had some bone thinning disease which caused a break and kind of wish I had asked the vet to take an x-ray but that would have been another expense and may not have yielded answers.
This is the side I hate about keeping piggies. I hate that she could not be saved. I hate that she spent her final days separated from her friends so I could monitor her. I hate that she was in pain😭😭. I wish she could have lived to be 7 and die peacefully in her sleep. I wish this for all piggies but know it is seldom the reality. RIP my beautiful funny girl.
 
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